


How To Spend Five Days In Paris

by tb_ll57



Series: A Brother Is Born For Adversity [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Consent Issues, Conspiracy, Dark(ish) Lupin, Friends to Lovers, Gap Filler, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Legilimency, Light(ish) Snape, M/M, Mentor/Protégé, Murder, Pensieves, Post-First War with Voldemort, Pre-Series, Spies & Secret Agents, Trust Issues, Undecided Relationship(s), Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-25 01:27:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 51,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3791518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tb_ll57/pseuds/tb_ll57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war's over.  More or less.  People change.  Or they become more themselves.  Severus Snape finds himself in possession of Remus Lupin's secrets once again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.
> 
> ~Meditations In An Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

'What's this, then?'  Severus turned the cuff to the light.  It was not silver, could not be silver, not on the man who wore it.  A glint of copper gleamed on the raised edges of the engravings, where time had begun to rub away the gilt.  A row of tusked elephants marched from each end of the cuff to meet in the middle, joined by a moon three-quarters full.

'Got it from a john,' Lupin said.  He slid off the bracelet, balanced delicately between two forefingers.  A slow grin spread across his mouth.  'Oh, your face,' he said.  'You know that's a tell, how you freeze up like that.'

'I know no such thing.'  He sat back, dry-mouthed.  Reached for his wine.  The glass was empty but for a swirl of sediment.  'What business you do and with whom is no-- no business of mine.'

A glint of teeth was his answer.  'John Prosper,' Lupin repeated.  Then, 'He was two years ahead of us at Hogwarts.'

From a john.  A John.  Severus sneered at his most elegant, as Lupin exhaled a dusty laugh.  'But it is a lover's gift,' he guessed, and Lupin nodded affably enough.  'Why elephants?'

'You remember the Spirit Animal lesson in Fifth Year Divination?'

'No, I'd dropped it by then.  Your spirit animal is the elephant?'

'Large mammal.  Grey.  Travels in packs.'  One hand raised and fell back to the duvet, a Gallic shrug.  'John drew his own conclusions.  I didn't correct him.'  The cuff turned this way and that, fingerpads tracing familiar paths over the etchings.  'He's dead now,' Lupin said, quite casually.

Severus searched him for clues the way he would have a map with no directional key.  He thought, perhaps for too long in silence, but said only, 'If you can cry, you're not so far gone as you think.'

'Am I?'  Lupin brushed his thumb over his cheek.  The streak of wet on his finger seemed to fascinate him.  'It's strange, isn't it.  As if my body remembers.  But I don't feel it.  I--'  He hitched on a laugh.  'Isn't it strange, I can't even want it badly enough.'

Severus turned the cuff to the light of the flickering candle.  'Why didn't he give it back?'

'John?'

'Dumbledore.  Why didn't he give it back to you?'

'When you tattle on my evil plans tomorrow, you can ask him.'

'Lupin.'

'You won't surprise him.'  Lupin took the cuff from him, and set it aside.  Strung along the neck of the empty bordeaux bottle.  He said, 'Dumbledore didn't save us.  He didn't save anybody, but-- he didn't try, with us.  You know why.  He's too much of the Light.  And we're not enough.  His werewolf and his Death Eater.  We're useful.  We're necessary.  Because we can do the things his other tools won't.  Can't.'

'He doesn't know,' Severus protested, 'he can't.  You said you've not been in contact.'

Lupin lay flat on the bed, knees cocked, til he lifted his right leg and let it fall over Severus' lap.  He pushed the limp pillow out of his way, eyes open, blank to the cracked plaster ceiling above them.  He blindly but unerringly found Severus' hand on the duvet, and lifted it to his crotch.  He covered it with his own.

Severus wet his dry lips.  'I'm going to tell him tomorrow,' he said.  'I'm going to tell.  I can't let you go through with this.'

'I don't believe you,' Lupin replied, and if he didn't know what he knew he might have thought that soft whisper was tenderness, the caress on his hand was love.  'But that's for tomorrow,' Lupin added then, and drew him down for a kiss.

 


	2. One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?
> 
> ~Meditations In An Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

The question-and-answer ran over for the two o'clock session, and Severus was not alone in attempting to slip into the auditorium late for the three o'clock.  A crowd of twenty or so wizards lingered in the back by the doors, shuffling their feet as they scanned for open seats in the gallery.  Felix Favager, a notorious droner, was still giving an introduction that promised to be lengthy, rambling between French and English as each new tangent struck him, paying only the vaguest mind to the notes he waved about in his hand.  Judging he had the time, Severus struck out, taking the left aisle and descending the steps.  The front rows were all jammed, the near-sighted and the fore-sighted who'd arrived early to stake out the best seats.  He spied at least one renowned academic jostling for position, though the emeritus elders of the field had the boxes lining the stage and would not descend to such a hubbub.  Curious though he was, Severus preferred not to go elbow-to-elbow with anyone, and took the first seat he found in the third tier, near the end of the row and perched between a wizened old witch who fanned herself with her programme and a boy young enough to be an apprentice who openly napped, jaw sagging to his chest.  Severus tucked his feet together and lowered himself onto the wooden bench.

The stage was draped with heavy velvet curtains of royal blue, which parted at the centre to frame a massive cork board displaying enlarged diagrams.  This far back, the details of the diagrams were lost, though they appeared luridly, even ludicrously coloured.  One depicted an outstretched human skeleton descending in stages to a wolf in unlikely yellow and green.  Perhaps included to balance out the visuals, another depicted the various species of the aconitum flower and stem.  There was not, Severus noted with irritation, any documentation of the potion which was, supposedly, the subject of the actual lecture.

'Ah, is that the time?' Favager wondered, finally noticing the stagehand who had been attempting to capture his attention.  'Yes, of course.  Ladies, gentlemen, today's featured speaker.  Samuel Damocles, Master of Potions from the Royal Institute of Magical Education in Stockholm, Order of the Merlin from her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth of Grande Bretagne and the Wizengambol-- Excusez-moi, the Wizengambit.'  Severus was not the only member of the audience to sigh or roll an eye; Favager was also notorious for his petty provincialism, but the man was an institution within the International Body of Potioneers.  The old man beamed at his audience and applauded; it was several embarrassing seconds before anyone realised he didn't applaud himself, but Damocles, who belatedly took the cue and emerged from the wings.  Severus clapped politely and briefly.

'My thanks for that, er, introduction,' Damocles said, shaking hands with Favager, who made a job of that as well and seemed in no rush to vacate the stage.  'Ah,' Damocles hesitated, 'ah, let's bring out-- yes, please, ah, Monsieur Favager, I'll need this space by the podium...'

Favager was finally persauded to amble off, and the faintly red-faced Damocles took his place with relief.  Stagehands brought out a stool and a spotlight, setting them up near the rim of the stage and blinding a swathe in the front row before they got the lampshade correctly directed.  Behind them shuffled out a stocky, weary-looking man in a loose white robe.  He sat on the stool as Damocles cleared his throat.  A low murmur swept the auditorium as the man removed his robe, letting it pool at his naked lap, baring a heavily scarred torso to the lamp's harsh glow.

'Esteemed colleagues,' Damocles began.  'We're running a bit behind, so, er-- yes.  To the point straightaway.  The Wolfsbane Potion.  Some of you will be familiar with its development from the three articles I published in _Potions Internationaal_ , _The Collegiate Connection_ , and _Mystical Maladies_.  I had meant-- ah, I had a bit describing it, but we're twenty minutes in the bank already-- ah, yes.'  He fumbled through his notes, discarding several pages in embarrassed anxiety, and heaved a trembling breath that fuzzed the magical vocal projection of his voice.  He jumped.  'Sorry, so sorry.  Ah.  Yes, with the aid of my colleage Sylvia Pritchard, several years of experimentation resulted in what today is known as the Wolfsbane Potion for the control and treatment of individuals afflicted with the werewolf curse.'

The man on the stool was a werewolf, then.  And one too tired to protest sitting stripped of his dignity before a hall of people extremely interested in his naked form.  Severus saw dozens in the crowd using omnioculars to view him in the greatest detail.  To Severus it appeared the man was perhaps thirty, though it was often difficult to tell, with curse sufferers; chronic pain aged a man.  His ropey muscles were slack as he slumped on his stool, and his eyes drifted, unfocussed.  He jumped abruptly as Damocles left the podium with a long wooden dowell and prodded him in the shoulder.

'Note the unusual formation of scar tissue,' Damocles invited the crowd.  A rap of the rod prodded the werewolf to lift his arm, the better to display the web of purplish tracks on his torso, and Damocles beamed at his audience.  'Yes, see here where the epidural fibrosis has maintained an early stage of growth despite a near decade of treatment.  Like most curse-related scarring, the initial infliction causes neurological abnormalities which appear to be irreversable.  Both the original curse scar-- that's this rather bat-shaped one here, the original bite-- and the self-inflicted scars of monthly transformations remain in only semi-healed states.  Fortunately werewolves do not seem unduly prone to infection, but the dermis is not the only tissue thus affected.  Comprehensive scans have revealed multiple breaks to the extremities and irreperable damage to the spinal column.  As you've all surely guessed, cartilage and tendons also deteroriate far more rapidly than in an individual without these unique stressors.  I say, I'm sorry, would you mind standing-- yes, here, note the ruptured quadriceps tendon.  Inflicted two days ago during the full moon.  Normally a quick fix, any experienced mediwizard, but in the case of a curse-afflicted individual we see retarded repair, considerable swelling.  We've left the rotator cuff in an untreated state to demonstrate the difference between applied remedy and natural healing.'

The werewolf winced when Damocles prodded his arm with the dowell.  His eyes closed, and he made no sound as Damocles rambled on over his head.

'Now, the Wolfsbane Potion cannot and does not ameliorate injury related to the expression of the curse's directive, which in this case obviously is the transformation of human form to lupine.  You can sit,' Damocles recalled, and without a word the werewolf resumed his stool without even reaching for the robe to cover his nakedness.  A light sheen of perspiration gleamed on his skin in the heat of the lamp.  'What the Wolfsbane Potion does address are the neurological symptoms associated with that transformation.  Extensive studies of the werewolf curse have ascertained, ah, sorry, my notes are out of order--'

'I heard he changed his name,' whispered someone in the row ahead of Severus.  'To make it more glamourous.'

'Oh?  What was he before?'

'Belby,' came the answer, followed by a titter.

'Yes, here.'  Damocles cleared his throat.  'Obviously the curse creates certain neurological pathways which have lingering effects on the human form, and the Wolfsbane Potion acts as a blocker to the effects of the curse-generated transformation by, effectively, well, effectively by poisoning the afflicted.  If the curse cannot latch onto designated pathways, the transformation is rendered at least partially inert.  We're of course dealing with a magically inflicted curse, so it will never be more than partial, but the individual thus afflicted can retain, depending on their reaction, some level of human mental acuity even in the grips of this most monstrous transformation.'

The lecture ran over, delayed by a lengthy and heated discussion of the efficacy of regional varietals.  Severus found it interesting but no more enlightening than the articles had been, and he was only amused that Damocles repeatedly defended his original formulation despite published advances in the formula.  Severus, being the author of at least one of those advances, said nothing even when his name was raised.  He had no especial recognition within the community and did not desire a reputation for picking fights with his colleagues even when warranted.  The academic community was too small and the better journals controlled by finicky, but powerful, elders who offended readily and held grudges for decades.  There were better ways to undermine a man whose greatest accomplishment was mostly luck, and Severus had already delivered this blow weeks ago when he'd extended his guest pass to a man much more inclined to make a self-serving scene.

Horace Slughorn was first in line to congratulate Damocles at the close of the lecture.  The pompous blowhard even made it on stage before Damocles had cancelled the vocal magnifier spell, and managed to claim personal responsibility for the entire trajectory of Damocles' career before his former student shut him up.  Severus allowed himself a tight smile of satisfaction.

The werewolf garnered nearly as large a crowd as the wizard.  Though many departed through the wide double doors at the head of the gallery, off to the Social and its provision of flowing alcohol, some two dozen had descended on the werewolf.  The man was standing again, arms akimbo as wizards bent over his limbs, his scars, one even going so far as to personally manipulate each of his fingers.  They chatted brightly over him as he stared distantly.

'It's only distasteful because it's happening in public,' a low voice behind him said.

Severus turned on his bench.  'Is it,' he murmured.  'Distasteful, that is.'

Remus Lupin did not rise to that.  His mouth was soft and unexpressive, but his eyes seemed to be smiling.  They were a deeper green than Severus had remembered.  He cursed himself for noticing, and for noticing it so immediately.  There was a fresh scar on Lupin's cheek, brushing upward into his hairline.

'Taking up Potions for Beauxbatons?' Severus asked sharply.

'Not today.'  Lupin leant his elbows on the bench rail before him, resting his chin on clasped hands.  'Word went out about the Wolfsbane lecture.  There's at least five of us here.'  He nodded toward a woman who loitered in the aisle, gnawing nervously at a fingernail.  Two men, one silver-haired and one quite a bit younger, who argued in hushed tones by the back wall.  A mother with a drawn face who tended an infant at her breast, wrapped protectively in a worn cloak.  'And those are just the ones who dared come publicly.  You might imagine there's considerable interest out there.'

'Bad luck your standard bearer is a buffoon.'

'He's not so bad.'  Lupin caught his eyes on the sly.  'I remember him at Hogwarts.  Top marks.'

'Under Slughorn.'

'You had top marks under Slughorn.'

Severus stiffly faced forward.  'Standards are rather higher under current management.'

Lupin didn't laugh.  But one of his hands dipped over the rail and brushed the wood nearer Severus, almost touching his arm.  'Fancy a drink as you're here?' he asked then.  'I'm working tonight.  Could meet you tomorrow.'

There was no courteous way to decline.  Severus didn't attempt courtesy.  'We have nothing to say to each other.'

'And yet, here we are, talking like normal folk.'  Lupin stood, shrugging on his denim coat and turning up the collar.  'I'll pick you up at your hotel.'

'You don't know my hotel.'

'No,' Lupin said patiently.  'You'll have to tell me which one it is you're staying at.'

Vast reluctance overturned his gut.  On stage, Damocles had finally shed his admirers, and even Slughorn was ambling off somewhere, arm in arm with an older witch who chuckled at some anecdote the old fool regaled her with.  Stagehands were wrestling the large corkboard away to the wings.  The werewolf robed himself and stood hunched as his stool and lamp were removed.  Damocles walked off without a word to him; in fact, no-one spoke to him at all.  When the heavy curtains fell, sealing him away from sight, he was still standing there, waiting for nothing.

'La Petite Madeleine,' Severus said, and shoved to his feet.  'No later than seven, please.  I have no desire to traipse across Paris all night.'

'Seven,' Lupin echoed, and watched him leave.

 

 

**

 

 

'Bordeaux,' Severus ordered, but Lupin laid a hand over his.

'Cognac,' he corrected, nodding to their waiter.  'Deux, veuillez.  Merci.'  He removed a pouch from his pocket and dropped it to their table.  Small white squares of paper, and fragrant tobacco leaves.  'You smoke?' he asked Severus, licking his thumb to separate a thin sheet from the pile and sprinkling tobacco along the edge.  He rolled a cigarette swiftly, with the ease of practise.  He wet the edge of the paper along his tongue, and lifted the sputtering candle to light one twisted end.  He sucked gently, and a moment later smoke dribbled from his nostrils.  He offered it.

'No,' Severus declined, then changed his mind and took it before Lupin's hand lowered.  He put it to his lips, finding it just slightly damp.  The smoke tickled his throat, spicy on his tongue.  Lupin rolled another before he returned the pouch to his pocket, sitting back with his boot knocking the wobbling table leg.

The pub, or bar, or cafe or whatever the French preferred to call their dimly lit venues of dubious social company, was already reeking of decades, probably centuries of caliginous pollution.  The antique furniture on which they perched was just slightly small for modern height, polished by too much use, threadbare velvet cushions marked by an unending stream of visitors.  Lupin had chosen the venue, only a short walk through Bouzillé Alley, the Wizarding neighbourhood which had nestled in the centre of Paris a thousand years before it had been named the Place de la Concorde.  Like its English brother in London, it bore that curious mark of Wizarding heritage, a reluctance to let go of the old, that faintly ridiculous imperviousness to the passage of time.  At the bar a witch with a towering powdered wig and a moth-eaten Roccoco gown of violent turquoise sipped from a pewter goblet; two stools away a pair of youths wearing Napoleonic frock coats over their denims and Doc Martins drank cocktails and argued vociferously in French.  One had a piercing through his nose, the other in his eyebrow.  Lupin in his proletariat denim was almost too dull to notice.

'It's been years since I heard news from home,' Lupin said at last, turning his head to blow a stream of smoke away from them.

'Why?'

'Why what?'

'Why has it been years,' Severus clarified, irritated and unsure if Lupin were playing with him.  Lupin at twenty had been almost devastatingly naked in his every emotion.  He'd _had_ every emotion, sometimes all at once, but it had always been there in his face, every lightning flash of feeling.  Lupin at twenty-six was remote, alien.  Even the way he sat was different, aggressively composed.  Severus was rigidly upright, posture he'd drilled into himself through years of grinding effort, and thought Lupin had worked quite as hard to achieve his own placid demeanour.

Lupin sucked on the tip of his cigarette.  'Who would I talk to,' he said, closing it off not as a question but a statement.

'Dumbledore,' Severus replied, dubiously.

Lupin knocked ash into the dented tin on their table as the waiter finally returned with their drinks.  'News of Hogwarts?' he asked, sipping without proposing a toast or something equally awkward, and setting the cigarette to his mouth again.

That was safe ground, if occupied only briefly.  Lupin nodded at the staff roster.  Inquired in slightly more depth about last year's Quidditch matches.  Lupin followed that to mention of the new Red Sprite Collector's Broom, on display at _Grands jeux_ just up the road.  The Red Sprite line wasn't priced for sport, nor built for anything so brutal as Quidditch, but the new Silver Fox model with its damasked rosewood was a beautiful piece, by all accounts.

'Most of the Slytherin team are still flying Cleansweeps,' Severus said, disgusted.  He paused for a swallow of his cognac.  It burned pleasantly against the heavy cloves of the cigarette.  'What's the preferred model at Beauxbatons?'

'Lumineuses,' Lupin answered.  He took a final puff and ground out the stub of his fag.  'Or was at least when I was there.'

Severus paused with his snifter raised.  'I thought you were teaching there?'

'I did.  Not quite five years.'  Lupin waited just long enough to let the silence fill with questions Severus refused to speak, chosing instead to stare hard at the dusty chandelier of cut crystal overhead.  'The usual,' Lupin said then.  'Pitchforks, torches.  Howlers from parents.  The Headmistress provided a generous severance.'

Severus did not ask what Lupin did with himself now, if he'd been sacked, and Lupin did not fill that blank.  Instead, Severus said, 'You went to the lecture yesterday.  About Wolfsbane.'

'Did you ever publish about it?  You made considerable alterations.'

'Improvements,' Severus said, and Lupin smiled for the first time, so Severus scowled, and added a flat, 'Not for lack of trying.'

'You staying for the rest of the conference?'

'To the bitter end.  Dumbledore has a number of contacts within the community.  I am--'  He drew a breath to get the horrible words out.  'An ambassador of international academic cooperation.'

That won a genuine laugh.  'Poor man.'

'It's hell.'  There was no good moment for it, and even under threat from Dumbledore he wouldn't be bullied into another torturous drinks on the town, so he said it, reckoning he'd at least be spared ever seeing Lupin again if he was in no rush to return to British shores.  'Whatever you've done with your hair is... nice.'

'You like it?'  Lupin brushed a finger over the feathery lock that fell over his eye.  'David Bowie.  He's a bit of all right.'

'Yes,' Severus said, supposing that was the correct response.

'You're more Robert Smith.  Very "Charlotte Sometimes".'

Muggle culture, he could only presume.  It could be Wizarding and he'd know even less about it.  'Yes,' he said.

'You're shit at flirting.'  Lupin finished his drink.  'You want to come home with me?'

That was coming to the point with a vengeance.  If Lupin could play blunt, Severus could match him.  'Have you got a home, then?'

'Suppose you're about to find out.'

They walked, no longer speaking.  Bouzillé Alley was crowded, even this time of night, with late diners and people making their way home from a day's work.  Horse-drawn trolleys clanged and rumbled up the crooked street, and though the bite of autumn chilled the air considerably after sunset the crowds loitered out of doors, congregating around bottles of wine, animated as they conversed.  Lupin walked along with his hands comfortably stowed in his pockets, the shearling collar of his coat popped but unbuttoned to the cool breeze.  Severus carried his overcoat rather than don it, warming his own hands beneath its heavy woollen folds.  They drew considering stares from the occasional young witch.  This, Severus thought, bemused, was youth, as people like Minerva McGonagall were at pains to describe it.  Young and free, no worries or responsibilities, the whole night stretched before them waiting for adventure.  He'd never especially noticed it before.  It had never especially been his to experience.

It was quite the home indeed, a stately mansion in marble to which Lupin led him.  The iron gate swung open when Lupin spoke the password, and they trod a short path through a garden of roses and topiaries trained to tall spires, a thick night fragrance of juniper swirling around them.  But it wasn't the grand front door for them; Lupin wordlessly guided him around the back and down a short stairwell to the basement, and for entry there he used a key.  The kitchen, and quite a well appointed one, in the lavish style of the wealthy and titled.  Huge islands of shined old oak, copper pots of every possible kind hanging from great racks on the low ceiling, deep porcelain sinks in pristine white.  A row of four covered plates lined the pastry table, and Lupin took one from the middle, leaving the namecard.  'Hungry?' he asked, angling the lid to reveal chicken thighs in some viscous orange sauce.  'Enough for two.'

'No,' Severus said, discovering an edgy itch of anticipation in his fingertips.  He rolled his shoulders to loosen them, hugged his coat to his chest.

'Maybe later, then.'  Lupin left his plate in the cold cupboard.  Licked his thumb and helped himself to an apple from the overflowing fruit bowl.  'It's a climb.  I'm in the attic.'

'What is this place?'

'23 Rue Chevrefeuille.'  There were stairs.  Though cramped and confined to the outer edge of the house, judging by the windows overlooking a small kitchen garden and laundry lines, Severus glimpsed opulence beyond the landings, doors gilted, portraits framed in cabled silver and gold, a dining hall posh enough for the Minister of Magic.  Even the wallpaper was extravagent, at least beyond what was surely the servant's passage.  Silk, chinoiserie, hand-painted.  In younger years such an exuberant display of affluence would have burnt him with jealousy.  It still did, but only a pale ache that was mostly nostalgia for the boy he'd been, to care about such things.  It was beautiful, but it was hollow.

'What do you do for them?' he wondered aloud.

'I'm a tutor,' Lupin said.  'They've two children.  Delphine is nine.  Quite bright.  Germaine is four.'

Private tutors were less common in England, even amongst the oldest Pureblood families.  Nearly every Slytherin Severus had known had attended some kind of boarding before Hogwarts.  Half-bloods, who tended to show their magic later, if at all, fell toward Muggle schooling.  But four years, that was young enough for the nursery still.  'Tutor' was perhaps a gloss on a post Lupin might find embarrassing, faced with someone who might have been a colleague, a full Professor at a respected institution.  Then again, if Lupin were ashamed of his job, he could have suggested they go to Severus' hotel instead.  Severus watched Lupin climb, a few steps above him, and had no more answers now than before.

The attic bedroom was a small space beneath sloping eaves, a carelessly plastered ceiling in age-stained whitewash coming to a dusty point just slightly taller than a man's height.  A large bed took nearly the entire space, a brass frame patinaed green on the bulbous knobs at each corner, a wrinkled counterpane of faded blue, a fur for extra warmth.  Tea-coloured lace covered the diamond-shaped window, but the glow of the waning moon threw bright light over the shabby space and its shabbier occupant.  Lupin shed his coat onto an ancient upholstered chair, kicked his shoes to the shag pile rug.

' _Lumos,_ ' Severus cast, touching the wand holstered in his belt, and an old-fashioned tulip glass lit itself, casting every shadow in rose.

Lupin considered him, if that was what his unblinking gaze was for.  'You don't have to undress if you don't want,' he said, 'I recall you don't like it.'

No.  Yes.  He didn't know, and there was nothing in Lupin's face to guide him toward the right response.  Lupin took his coat.  It slid from his fingers, til, convulsively, he let it go.  Lupin treated it with more care than he had his own, draping it gently over the brass footrail of the bed.

'Then again,' Lupin continued, 'you didn't truly like me.  And I've got nothing to give for you anymore.  So I wonder what, exactly, we're doing here together.'

'You invited me for a drink.'

'Yes.'

'And here, for this.'

'I did, yes.'  Lupin sat.  His mattress sagged a bit beneath him.  'What is this, Severus?'

Bereft of the shield of his coat he composed his hands before him, fingers interlaced.  'This is settling debts,' he said.

Lupin's mouth tightened.  Then, bit by bit, the harsh lines by his eyes smoothed, and then a hint of a dimple creased his cheek, and then suddenly he laughed.  He covered his face with a hand and his shoulders shook.  'I can't decide if you think too little of me or too much of yourself,' he gasped, and laughed again.  'You know who would have enjoyed that?  Sirius.  He always thought I should be grateful when a straight man deigned to touch me, too.'

Severus flushed.  If he'd not already been clasping his hands, one of them would have leapt to slap those words off Lupin's mouth.  'How dare you,' he began, and stopped himself by closing his eyes, holding his breath, squeezing his hands so tightly into fists that the knuckles creaked.  'Do not ever compare me to that filth again.'

Silence fell.  Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed the hour.  When he could look without stomach-clenching fury, he found Lupin just sitting, just looking at him, face wiped of all expression.

'Did you know?'

'Did I know what.'

'What Sirius was.'

'No.'  He'd asked himself a thousand times how he could not have known.  Masks, secrecy, conspiracy, maybe wilfull blindness.  'I swear by anything and everything holy I would have stopped him had I known.'

Lupin stood.  Quietly he took Severus by the lapels of his jacket, sliding thumb and forefinger along the crisp herringbone twill to the first button just below the breastbone.  He pressed it slowly through the buttonhole and then the next three as well, and then went down the line of buttons on the waistcoat.  Then he slid his palms up under the suiting along Severus' shirt, pushing the heavy material away and draping it over the chairback.  He took up Severus' left wrist and removed the ivory cufflink, and then the right wrist, laying them gently on the battered Davenport desk.  'Shoes,' he murmured, knocking Severus' boot with his toe, and blew out the lamp as he lay down on the bed.

They stretched out with a spare few inches of space between them.  The bed bowed, trying to roll them to the centre, springs whinging as they settled.  Lupin hugged a flat pillow beneath his chest and turned his head toward Severus, but made no move toward him, and Severus brushed his hair out of his eyes and stared up at the sloping ceiling, waiting for something-- a touch, he began to believe would not come, but surely Lupin would say something, do something.

'Are you sleeping?' he asked eventually, feeling foolish for whispering like a schoolboy.

Lupin breathed a slow deep exhale.  'I would do, if you'd stop thinking so loudly.'

'I should leave, if--'

Lupin bobbed one shoulder in a jagged shrug.  'I'm not walking all those stairs again.  I'll be up early tomorrow.  I'll get you out before the family are up.  You don't have to sleep if you don't want to, but I certainly will.'

'Lupin.'

'Remus.  You keep finding worse reasons to fuck me, but you're too good for my name?'  Lupin turned his head the other way.  'If you're serious about this debt.  There is something you could do.'

'Yes,' he said, relieved.  If they'd never met again, so be it; he had greater guilt to keep him awake at night than this.  But Lupin had known him for a spy and kept a secret that had likely saved his life.  They'd been grossly naive, the entire Order of the Phoenix, and naive as well in what they expected of each other.  Loyalty where mutually beneficial.  It was a small thing, in light of their many failures.  But, if any man knew what had been lost, it was this one.  And Severus would far rather live without that hanging over him, if he had to live this way at all.  'Without promising anything,' he added, a lifetime of caution and a youth far too full of well-earned resentment of people who blithely demanded too much too readily.

Lupin didn't question that qualification.  If anything, his shoulders went tighter, his voice smaller.  'Wolfsbane.'

It took him a moment.  A moment in which he realised Lupin's presence at the International Potioneering Exposition was not academic curiosity after all, and it was perhaps less than coincidence they had found themselves seated so near in the gallery.  In which he realised Lupin might have been waiting there for the last two days of the conference, hoping to run into someone who owed him.

'You want the potion brewed for you?' he guessed.

'No.'  Lupin tugged at his pillow.  'No, I have a contact.  There's only two or three who brew it, but that's not the problem.  The wolfsbane flower is regulated.  Most of the major poisons are regulated in France...  It's just that it's hard to get enough every moon.  If you could get any, even a little.  It would help.'

'It's not regulated in Britain,' Severus said, probing that carefully.  'It's not inexpensive, but no-one tracks the sales.'

Lupin breathed.  He said, 'I won't go back there.'

'Why?'

Lupin sat up.  'Will you get it for me or not?'

'Oh, that's all you want?  Wolfsbane, once a month forever?'

'Whatever you can get for me now.  I don't expect you to purchase it for me every-- look.  I'm not trying to extort you.  I'm not underselling you either.  I make a little money with the family, but mostly it's board and meals.  If I can't pay by next Wednesday I won't get the potion by the moon, and if I'm out for days and come back bloody and chewed with no good explanation for it, I'll lose my position.  So that's fit, all right.  I protected your position in the Order, you protect mine here.  We're quits.'

If there was another angle at play, he couldn't guess it.  It appeared entirely reasonable.  If not a little underwhelming.  It was barely more than a favour.  If Lupin thought Severus rated him lowly, he didn't price himself much higher.

So there was nothing to say for it but, 'Yes.'

'Then go to sleep,' Lupin replied, and flung himself back on his pillow.  'You are exactly the same, Severus Snape.  Exactly the bloody same.'

'So are you.'

Their eyes met across the bed.  'No,' Lupin said, and resolutely shut his eyes.  'I'm not.'


	3. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
> 
> ~Meditations In An Emergency by Frank O'Hara

His fitful sleep came to a violent end when the bed exploded.

Or so he thought, dream-addled mind reacting in confusion and terror to the suddenness of the assault. He thrashed to free himself of the duvet, rolled with the damnable dip of the thin mattress and took a blow to the ribs from his unseen attacker. As he whipped his wand from beneath the pillow, blearily sighting down its length, the creature that had knocked him flat went leaping for Lupin, giggling uncontrollably.

Giggling. The creature was a child. Who tackled Lupin with what seemed like a dozen hands, shrieking 'Chatouiller! Chatouiller!'

'What the bloody hell,' Severus complained, and flopped backward to suffer his heart attack resentfully. When he opened his eyes again, it was to find another child perched on the brass bedrail at his feet, staring at him. 'What?'

'Je me rends sans condition!' Lupin was moaning, quite theatrically. 'Oof! Malheur, pitié, honte. Bonjour, enfants.'

'Bonjour, Professeur!' the children chorused.

'And who spelled you, Germaine?' Lupin wondered, borrowing Severus' wand without permission to flick a 'Finite' at the boy, whose multiple hands faded down to the usual two.  The boy used them to clap hands with Lupin, then flung his arms about Lupin's neck.  Lupin did not return the child's affectionate gesture, Severus noticed, and his face became studiously blank as he stared at the ceiling.  He smiled, briefly, when the boy let him go, but it didn't reach his eyes.

'Qui est-il?'

'English after breakfast, Delphine,' Lupin said, sitting up.  He returned Severus' wand, handle first.  'This is Professor Snape.  He's visiting from England.'

'Snape,' repeated a voice at the door, most decidedly too deep for a child.  Once again caught unawares, Severus stared about.  A man, steel-grey hair, cavernous black eyes.  A coat of burgundy velvet, long about the thighs, the gold chain of a pocket watch looping to the waistcoat of ornate black and silver.

'Of Hogwarts,' Lupin said, seeming unsurprised by their newest visitor, though there was just the slightest challenge in his voice, an edge to his tone.  'A Potions Master of some renown.'

'You must be in town for the Potions exposition,' said the old man, his English almost unaccented and scrupuously polite for all the narrowed stare of those unhappy eyes.  He nodded curtly.  'A guest of such importance should have had his own room, Mr Lupin.'

'We had a bit of a night on the prowl,' Lupin replied, the words careless, the subtext bewildering.  Severus said nothing to contradict him, subtly tugging at his rumpled sleeves only to discover the cufflinks were missing.  Ah, removed the night before.  He recalled.  There would be no escape in such a state.  'We must have fallen asleep talking.  We were year-mates at school.'  Lupin smiled again.  It looked entirely unnatural.

'Delphine,' the old man said then, holding out an imperious hand for the girl, his dark leather glove gleaming in the bright morning sunshine.  The girl slipped off the bedrail, her yellow hair fanning out behind her as she skipped to his side.  The boy was just behind her, impish grin in place as the man gave him a gentle cuff to the ear.  'The children are ready for your trip,' the man told Lupin.  'We expect you in the foyer in half an hour.'

'Of course,' Lupin said, inclining his head, and with that the man escorted the children out, closing the attic door firmly behind him.

'What the bloody hell,' Severus repeated, hurling his pillow at Lupin.  A feather escaped the sham and lodged in Lupin's hair.

Lupin yawned, jaw cracking, and made his unhurried way to the cupboard for fresh clothes.  'The Baron d'Armagnac.  Noblesse d'épée.  They've been titled since the First Empire.'

'Allow me to guess,' Severus muttered.  'Louis, Jean, or Charles.'

Lupin laughed, though it was swallowed into another yawn.  'Claude.'

'And why exactly did you plant me in place to be seen by him?'

'Did I?'  Lupin tossed his shirt to the basket.  The vivid scars on his back flexed as he freed a hanger and donned another.

Severus had been certain when he said it.  That faltered, momentarily.  There was no obvious reason for it-- in fact it seemed likely to do more harm than good, if Lupin were worried enough about his position in the household to go begging after Wolfsbane.  And that excuse about talking through the night might fool the children, but Claude Whomever had clearly found it suspicious, and Severus absolutely would have, if presented with that weak an excuse.  After his rough awakening Severus only now had presence of mind to note how weary Lupin looked, how worn.  The shadows of his eyes were nearly purple.

'The water closet?' Severus asked, at length, as Lupin sat at the desk to tie his boot laces.

'The door that doesn't lead to the storage,' Lupin answered.  'Ignore the bat.  She's harmless.'

There was little enough he could do but scrub his sallow face and grimace over the stubble on his chin.  A brief 'Tempus' spell informed him it was still early, though not early enough for him to return to his hotel for a proper toiletry before the first session of the day's conference.  He'd be late.  And no time for breakfast.  He tried to be furious about it, tried to blame Lupin for making an elephant out of a fly.  He managed dim irritation, and sighed at his reflection in the little mirror over the commode.

'I'll be going,' he told Lupin when he returned to collect his cufflinks and coat.

'You could join us,' Lupin said.  'We're going to Musée de magie.  We could use the expertise of a Potions Master.'

'I'm on holiday,' Severus retorted.  'The point is to be as far as possible from children.'  He donned his coat, tugging it into place across his chest.  'I will... I will contact you.  When I have the wolfsbane.'

Lupin stopped him at the door, a hand on his hand, fingers cold.  'Thank you,' he said.

'I neither need nor desire your gratitude.'

'You don't know what it means.'  Lupin released him.  'But I suppose that's best.  I'll walk you out.'

With permission now to roam the big house, it was plain Lupin had found himself surrounded by wealth the likes of which even Lucius Malfoy would envy.  'New money,' Lupin told him with a little eyeroll, as they strode down an echoing marble hall lined with ancient suits of armour to one side and priceless enchanted tapestry depicting the family's ancestors to time immemorial.  'They were peasants in time immemorial.  But the competition for aristocrats thinned a bit with the Revolution.  They count themselves Purebloods, as much as anyone can on the Continent.'

Lucius Malfoy could only look back seven generations.  Severus chose not to say this.

The children were indeed waiting in the ballroom that passed as the foyer.  They wore pleasant uniforms and were immaculately groomed, obedient enough now they weren't springing an ambush on Lupin in bed.  They chattered brightly and too rapidly for Severus to follow in piping French, Lupin listening politely but not attentively.  Severus did not dawdle, and made for the door.

'Good-bye,' Lupin called after him.

'Good-bye,' Severus echoed.  He looked back as he stepped from cool dusty history into the bright haze of morning.  The Baron had joined Lupin and the children.  They stood in the shadow of a velvet-draped window, too close.  Words were being exchanged, too softly to carry, but the old man was rigidly angry, his mouth set in a snarl.  In reply Lupin stepped in even nearer, chest to chest.  His cold fingers curled about the man's neck.  It was a clear threat, but if anything the Baron relaxed.  He tilted his head back, willingly, and Lupin's mouth brushed over his chin in a kiss.  The children played nearby, oblivious.

Severus shut himself outside, and Apparated back to his hotel.

 

**

 

There were whispers, during the first two hours of the conference that morning, but by the first break it was the buzz throughout the entire Exposition.  Samuel Mervin Damocles had been attacked in his hotel.

'I heard he was stabbed twenty times,' said one wizened old witch over her coffee and croissant.

'I heard they slashed up his face,' replied her companion, cheerful at the notion.

'But who do you think could have done it?' was the conversation by the windows, as Severus passed.

'Who wouldn't?' shrugged a man with an English accent, though his back was turned and Severus didn't immediately recognise his voice.  'He's an utter twat, in't he.  I could accidentally drop a load of aconitum in a cauldron and call it the invention of the decade.'

'You'd have to sober up first,' someone retorted, and laughter trailed Severus on his path toward the library.

He'd thought to retreat, looking for a quiet to solace his jangled nerves.  He did not naturally seek large crowds and days in the unrelenting press of so many people had begun to wear on him.  At least at Hogwarts, where the number of children always seemed to be multiplying nightmarishly, he had his office, his private lab, his rooms.  He longed for his rooms.  It hadn't seemed worth the bother of the queue for the International Floo every night; now he wondered if he'd be quite so exhausted if he'd been home in his own bed at night.

The library was an ancient collection in the Hall of Mystical Sciences, and he had spent the majority of his free time in this room that smelled of must and slowly mouldering paper.  It was not as large as the library at Hogwarts, but it contained a goodly number of rare texts, especially for Potions.  It was a highly competitive field and it had been common practise in previous centuries to destroy personal formulae lest they fall into the hands of a rival.  Even the most common household potions had follwed receipts that were, at best, reliant on the interpretation and experience of the brewer; Severus was not the only Potions Master to despair of imparting even basic competence in students for whom 'precision' was a concept beyond all comprehension.

Yet even in the library gossip chased him.  He had no sooner picked up yesterday's place in the catalogue of fifteenth-century experiments in alchemy than voices raised in idle chatter pricked his ears.  He sighed heavily and attempted to ignore it, but a word caught his attention, and unwillingly he turned to see who it was.

Horace Slughorn.  Of course.

'It was the werewolf, obviously,' Slughorn was saying, not at all quietly.  'We all saw it.  Positively loathing.  Dangerous fellow, and I did warn poor Sam to watch his back with those sorts.'

Slughorn hovered his big gut over the edge of a desk occupied by a slim and pretty young witch, who looked none too pleased at his intrusion.  She attempted, stiffly, to ignore him, responding only with a distant 'Hm'.

'Of course you've heard it, quite the scene,' Slughorn continued obliviously.  'His room was totally destroyed.  Bed overturned, that nice set of chairs smashed to smithereens.  And Sam!  Poor Sam.  The creature attacked him most brutally.  I told the Healers myself to mind those scars to the face, of course in Britain we've far more experience with curse scars, but they'll never heal, you know.  Such a grateful young man, such a pity.  Always a favourite of mine.'

There were only ten minutes left in the break.  Severus scowled at the clock which ticked away his precious free time, but steeled himself.

'Horace,' he greeted the man, striding toward the carrell and its occupants.  'Mademoiselle,' he added, for the young lady.  'Pardon my interruption, but I overheard.  You've spoken to the Healers, Horace?'

'Oh yes,' Slughorn said, blinking owlishly at him.  He brightened then.  'Ah, Severus!  This is another of my young men, Severus Snape,' he told the witch.  'Took on my teaching post at Hogwarts.  I hear he's quite the rising star, he--'

'Damocles,' Severus interrupted.  'I thought the attack only happened last night?'

'Oh, yes, it did, but I'm the one who found him,' Slughorn said, chest puffing as if this were a source of pride.  'Poor boy,' Slughorn added, belatedly.  'Late for our breakfast meeting.  I took it upon myself to investigate.'

'And you're convinced it was a werewolf?'

'Not just any werewolf!  That dirty scoundrel who attended Sam's lecture the other day.  Yes, I'm quite sure of it.'

'But why?' asked the witch, drawn in despite herself.  'Was he still there?'

'No, no, of course not.  But who else would it be?  It would have to be a Dark Creature, and, as I saw for myself, the marks are unmistakably a werewolf's.'

'But it's not the full moon,' Severus pointed out.  'Attacking in his human form would not impart the curse.'

'Well, no, it wouldn't, but--'

'And if he had no claws or teeth,' the witch mused, 'there's really no weapon involved.'

'Still dangerous!' Slughorn declared, curling his fat fingers into claws and baring his canines rather ridiculously.  'And poor Samuel, handsome lad, a terrible scratch right down his cheek, like this!'

'Is there any actual evidence it was a werewolf?' Severus pressed him.

The word 'actual' seemed to offend, and Slughorn glowered at him.  'I'm sure the Frenchies will track him down,' his old professor said, less enthusiastic now.  'Can't be hard to find a vagrant like that.  And to think, Sam was so generous to the creature.  Seven sickles for performing at the lecture, and all he had to do was sit there.'

The witch cast Slughorn a look of disgust, and rose, gathering her parchment and quill.  'I must be off if I'm to get a good seat at the session.'

'I'll escort you, my dear.  Which session are you attending?'

She hesitated.  'The... infectious diseases panel,' she said, cautiously, and Slughorn's face fell.

'I'm headed for the Native Foliage and Remedy panel,' he said.  'One of my students is speaking.  Lazarus Higson.  Fascinating subject, he traipses all over North America camping with the Indians, wompums and tompums and such.  Perhaps you'd be interested in switching?'

'I'm afraid not,' she said, with a frozen smile.  'Good day, Professor.'

'Oh, I'll walk part of the way with you at least--'

'I believe those sessions are in two very different directions,' Severus pointed out.  'I'm attending the lecture on Modern Herbalism, which is, I believe, next door to the Infectious Diseases panel.  May I escort you, Mademoiselle?'

'Thank you,' she said in a rush, and Severus wasted no time in removing her from Slughorn's presence before the old rascal could invent an excuse to follow.

'Thank you,' she said again, as they crossed the lobby and joined the crowds whisking this way and that, chimes announcing the five-minute warning.  'I didn't wish to be rude.  He's harmless, just...'

'Yes,' Severus agreed.  'You're not actually attending the infectious diseases--?'

'No,' she said, smiling to be caught out.  'But it seemed prudent to seed a little misdirection.'

'Undoubtedly.'  Severus hesitated.  'Well-- good day.'

'I'm sorry, you said your name was...'

'Severus Snape.'  He took her offered hand and bowed slightly over it.  'Professor of Potions at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.'

'It's a pleasure to meet you, Severus Snape.'  There was a hint of a dimple in her cheek.  Then she sobered.  'I'm sorry about your friend Monsieur Damocles.  Whatever actually happened, it's so awful.  I hope he'll recover quickly.'  The chimes sounded again.  She tilted her head, her hair curling over the shoulder of her sombre grey robe.  'Enjoy the last day of the conference,' she said.

'You as well.'  He watched her go, politely sidestepping a rushing pair of wizards.  He almost called after her, but in the moment of indecision he lost his chance.  She was heading up the sweeping spiral stairwell, out of earshot.  And, he realised, he'd never heard her name.

Well, it hardly mattered.  He had nothing to say to some strange woman he'd met only in passing.  And it had been far less chivalry than mutual recognition of Slughorn's grasping nature, getting her out of his clutches.  He'd have done that-- well, he'd have done it for anyone undeserving.  It had nothing to do with green eyes.

He rubbed a spot that felt oddly sore in the centre of his chest.  He turned smartly on his heel and did not look back to see where she disappeared.

The question of Samuel Damocles remained active in his mind even as he turned his attention to the remainder of the Expo.  Of course he had no way of knowing whether it had or had not been that unnamed werewolf, or indeed actually a werewolf at all, but the pieces wouldn't join no matter how he nudged at them.  Why wait two days to attack?  And why attack at all?  The motivation was murky at best.  Resentment over his treatment, that seemed insufficient for such a level of retaliation.  And though he'd only seen the werewolf at a distance, for that single hour, Severus had seen misery and pain, not malice or violence.  Certainly personal animostiy could not be discounted, nor some kind of inciting incident, but--

It took him two hours to think of it.  The wolfsbane potion.

Lupin had said it was hard to get enough wolfsbane, that brewers were few and far between.  Perhaps promises had been made and then broken?  Or perhaps it was a burglary gone wrong?

 _The Daily Prophet_ had picked up the story, nestling it between news of a concert offering in Edinburgh and an opinion piece about the latest faux pas out of the Ministry.  _Samuel Damocles, known best for his 1979 publication of the Wolfsbane Potion treating the Werewolf Bite, injured while in Paris, France for academic conference.  Condition unknown; Damocles did not respond to owls requesting comment on the news._   Severus saw the article the day it was published, as it arrived hand-carried by Albus Dumbledore himself, making himself home with a plate of toast and plum jam at Severus' dining table the first morning he returned to Scotland after the Exposition.

Severus dropped the paper to the table.  'Yes,' he said.  'I'd heard.'

'Sad business,' Albus murmured, helping himself to the tea pot.  He at least refreshed Severus' cup as well, and with a flick of his finger spelled the milk to hover, ready.  'A small splash, am I correct?  Sugar?'

'Thank you.'  Severus waited, not particularly patiently.  'Why bring this to my attention?'

'Hufflepuff,' Albus said.

'What?'

'Samuel.'  Albus tapped the paper with the teaspoon.  'He was a Hufflepuff, if I correctly recall.  Two years ahead of you, I believe.  Ah, but I'm only pretending, and I'm sure I needn't, with you.  I checked the school archives.  Too many names to remember, these days.  A good problem to have.  Hogwarts thrives more than ever.'

Severus sipped his tea and waited.  The doddery fool act was just that, an act; less wary men grew impatient and impatient men gave away clues in their eagerness to finish a meandering conversation.  One could never be entirely sure what Albus wanted, and therefore had no measure for when one had given something important away.  Silence was better than the alternative-- and made it easier to clench his jaws against an unwise interruption.

Albus gave up releatively quickly, for once.  'I don't suppose you know more than the _Prophet_ what became of Mr Damocles?'

'No,' he replied.  'Rumour had it he'd been attacked by a werewolf.  I don't know the truth and I know nothing like the whole story, but that was the consensus.'

'Most curious.  Werewolves are seldom troublesome between the moons.'

He couldn't help his snort of derision.  Albus smiled, but didn't rise to the bait.

'Of course,' the old man continued, 'those that are troublesome between the moons are the most dangerous sort.  There is no reason to believe Mr Damocles might have been targeted by people we would wish to defend him against?'

It was the 'we' that triggered his understanding.  The Order of the Phoenix was dormant, not dead, and Albus was perhaps not wrong to think what he thought.

'I've heard nothing,' Severus said slowly.  'I can ask certain questions of certain people.  But I must be careful to avoid suspicion.'

'You are one of the most careful people I have ever met,' Albus murmured.  'And I wish you to continue to be so.  Do nothing to expose yourself.  But learn what you can.'

'Should I reach out to Damocles?  Find some reason to bring him in?'

'One of our number has already done so.'  He didn't offer a name, and Severus didn't ask, but he knew of one Order member already in Paris.  If it truly had been a werewolf attack, he hoped Damocles didn't know the nature of the man who'd be coming to his rescue.  'We can offer some protection, if it's warranted,' Albus said.  'Though he needn't be aware of it.'

'I'll keep you informed.'

'Thank you.'  Dumbledore finished his toast and brushed crumbs from his beard with his knotted fingers.  'The Exposition was worthwhile?'

'Slightly more informative than staring at my navel,' Severus said coolly.

Albus smiled slightly.  'You are droll, dear boy,' he commented, and rose.  In his robe of pale mauve he cut a handsome figure.  There was a white rose in his lapel, pinned at a jaunty angle.  'I trust you had a good time nonetheless?'

'Tolerable,' Severus said, and thought of Lupin, and added, 'Mostly.'

'Youth is wasted on the young.'  Albus patted his shoulder.  'I believe Minerva kept notes of your classes this past week.  No doubt she'll be by to deliver them today for your review.  I believe she had some issue with the seventh-year NEWTs preparation assignment?  Perhaps we ought all three to meet for a discussion.'

'Perhaps,' he grudged it, as he grudged Minerva's constant attempts to meddle in his lesson plans.  Sometimes she was an ally and sometimes she enjoyed, a bit too much so far as Severus was concerned, her senior position, calling him to the carpet over every minor incident involving her precious Gryffindors.  Albus mediated with the saintly patience of a man who wasn't truly paying attention as his Heads of House argued bitterly on the other side of his desk.  He stood to see his Headmaster to the door.  There he paused, and Albus, noting his expression of hesitancy, paused there with him.  'I saw Remus Lupin,' Severus said.

Eyes of faded blue were suddenly keen.  Albus parted his lips as if to speak, then pursed them instead.  'How is he,' he asked softly.

He hadn't actually meant to reveal their meeting; he had no intention at all of revealing more than that they had met in passing.  He turned over words in his mind, searching for a pithy description of odd ends and half starts that were like as not no mystery if he'd known what they signified.  He lifted his shoulders in a jagged shrug, and said at last, 'I had the impression he wouldn't especially like me to tell you.'

An expression of great sadness crossed that craggy face.  But only briefly, and then Albus smiled again, retreating behind the more familiar benignant mask.  'Welcome back, Severus,' he murmured, and left.


	4. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Should I cry out and see what happens? There could only be a stranger wandering in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself frozen fast in wintry eyes.
> 
> ~Meditations In An Emergency by Frank O'Hara

Lucius Malfoy wore a particularly pinched expression, as if he'd sniffed rotten eggs and stepped in something that would stain all at once. He touched his snifter with a grimace and wiped his hand on his kerchief distastefully.

Severus found the pub distasteful himself, but Malfoy's hauteur under assault was worth the inconvenience. Knockturn Alley stank of tallow smoke and rotting cabbage, was begrimed by centuries of malignant neglect. Its occupants were neither wealthy nor wise, and scrabbled for the hand-to-mouth existence the Wizarding world inflicted on its lowest caste. Knockturn was home to squibs and the barely gifted, wizards and witches in name only, the sort who never attended a school as prestigious as Hogwarts but loitered undereducated in the shadows of their peculiar society. Many were no better than Muggles, and in some ways quite a bit harder off, deprived of the conveniences and comfort of a modern life. The sagging sack of mouldering robes in any given doorway was someone hungry, or neglected, or dying slowly from some self-inflicted curse they were too incompetent to cure, too impoverished to pay for a healer. Wizards like Lucius Malfoy patronised a shop or a dimly-lit corner when they needed shelter for some dark business venture. Wizards like Severus Snape patronised it because their mothers didn't dare venture as far into the light as Diagon Alley, only a floo away.

'It won't kill you,' Severus said, indicating the liquor with a flick of his finger. 'Intentionally or otherwise.'

'That is the bare minimum I would expect of your experience of brandy,' Lucius returned, condescending and mostly correct. 'This... only barely qualifies.' He sipped it with an overdone shudder.

'I'd have been happy to meet in the comfort of Malfoy Manor.'

'Some transactions are best completed without an audience.'

There was truth in that. The watchful eye of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement would never fully turn from people like Malfoy, who'd escaped Azkaban with the careful application of money, threats, and promises to powerful people, but that wasn't the half of it. The Manor was full of hostiles, all of whom had eyes and ears. House elves were everywhere and saw everything, and it took stringent attention to prevent them bumbling into accidental truths when Aurors came to call. Human servants had no magical bond of loyalty. Portraits were eternally suspect; the Pureblood families were all entwined, and the residual personalities in the paintings often had obscure and tangled allegiances. There was no knowing what might offend some long-dead ancestor and cause him to go blabbing secrets to some cousin or in-law he found more commodious. Even the walls had ears. Any magical residence was seeped in layers of spells which could never be fully deconstructed, and the older the spellwork the more it took on life of its own.

And transaction it was. Lucius moved a stiff leather bag with his foot, sliding it across the greasy floorboards til it touched Severus' ankle. In return Severus nudged his crumpled cloth napkin against the guttering candle. A minute later, Lucius casually took it for himself, muffling the clink of gold galleons by setting his half-empty snifter down with a bang. And done.

'Pleasure as always,' Severus said, draining his cloudy gin and tonic and pushing back his chair.

'A moment.' Lucius glanced about, only his eyes moving as he swept the dark corners of the pub. 'You will have heard I've been awarded a seat at the Board of Hogwarts.'

Awarded. In return for healthy bribes, no doubt. It wasn't as prestigious as the Wizengamot or any of the international positions, but Hogwarts had always held strategic value. It was not for nothing that Albus Dumbledore had been contented for decades there, consistently disavowing the temporary power of a Ministry appointment. It had, in fact, been Voldemort himself who'd pushed Severus to apply for the position of Potions Master, the better to place him near Dumbledore. Indeed, if there were any man who could substantiate the strength of Dumbledore's influence, it was Severus. That fierce old mind had bent him for years. Lucius might understand it-- Abraxas Malfoy had been as hardhearted as Dumbledore was soft, and they shared, though Lucius didn't know it, the bitter knowledge that love withheld was the most torturous form of power.

Severus said, 'Congratulations,' and made to rise.  Lucius put out a hand.

'You know as well as I do,' he murmured, 'what this opportunity will mean for our kind.'

'Our kind?' Severus repeated acidly, though he, too, dropped his voice.  'Who exactly are "our kind", Lucius?'

'Slytherins,' was the prompt reply.  Severus read that, he was sure quite correctly, to stand in for any number of related and equally empty concepts.  Pureblood.  Wealthy, elite.  Oppressed by the result of their own grand schemes crumbling to dust in the wake of a would-be dictator's spectacular defeat.  Nothing that applied to Severus Snape, as Lucius very well knew.

'House loyalty?' Severus sneered.  'Rather a trite appeal.'

'Yes,' Lucius agreed, and it was only the sardonic arch of a pale brow that made Severus hesitate.  'It is.  But this is what we have to work with, and if you'd only stop to think a moment you'll realise what we can make of it.'

'Make of Slytherin.'

'Make of a new generation of wizards and witches.  My son will be seven this year.  When he begins Hogwarts in four years he will be sorted into the House from which great wizards emerge, the House which nutures power and ambition to use it.  A House full of wizards and witches who know how to win.  A House which will graduate the best and the brightest of their age, who will go out to careers in all reaches of the Ministry.  In a generation we could have Slytherins in every important post in Wizarding Britain, Severus, and you will be at the centre of it, guiding them.'

It was the calm certainty of the speech which made it seem so convincingly plausible.  Severus found his mouth was dry, his gut tight.  Yes, he nearly said, and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

Lucius turned his snifter a precise one-hundred-eighty degrees, balancing the glass by the tips of his fingers.  'You've been Head of Slytherin House for two years.  Both years you've won the House Cup.  Once is favourable circumstances.  Twice is good work.  You're in the lead for this year, as well.  Thrice would be a pattern.'

'And?'

'There is a difference between an administrator and a leader.'  Another ninety degrees.  'You must do more than nuture talent.  You must nuture talents which will serve specific ends.  You must nuture House loyalty, yes, but you must also demonstrate the transformation of House loyalty to the values Slytherin alumni will bring with them into the world beyond their schoolyard.  You must be the thin end of the wedge.  Small steps now will protect our ascendency for decades to come.'

'To what end,' Severus said.

Their eyes met.  'To victory,' Lucius replied, and lifted the glass to his lips.  'Next time.'

 

 

**

 

 

_I've requested a hook-up to the international Floo network for Tuesday, hours of nine to eleven.  I hope that will not unduly inconvenience you._

_RJL_

Lupin's terse missive hadn't included a reminder of the address.  That either indicated great confidence in Severus' recall, or an oversight from a man who didn't make those kinds of petty mistakes.

Or, Severus thought, as he threw Floo powder into the burbling flames of the Three Broomsticks' large hearth, an overabundance of caution that seemed drastically out of place in times of peace.  There were highly-placed Death Eaters who could have taken lessons from Lupin's letter writing.  Ambigious dates and times-- which Tuesday was not specified, nor morning or evening, but Lupin knew he was aware of the urgency, and Lupin also knew he was unavoidably occupied teaching in the morning.  Lupin's signature hid in the bottom corner, as if afraid to be noticed taking too much space.

Severus stepped out in a cloud of Scottish ash to a warm kitchen aglow with activity.  House elves in black sackcloth hopped this way and that scrubbing the place after what looked to be a large meal.  Dripping plates soard in arcs overhead, all the deep sinks overflowing with suds as the elves did the washing up.  A tiny little elf with drooping ears shrieked on seeing him, popping out of sight and returning two metres to the left, nattering at him in French.  He had only a schoolboy's grasp of the language, and her indifferent grammar and gulping pace prevented him understanding more than one word in five.  Irritated, he held up a hand, and she clapped her jaws shut with a squeak of fear.

'Remus Lupin,' Severus said, enunciating it clearly.

'Oui, Monsieur,' she whispered.  She pointed a trembly finger toward the double set of doors that marked the far boundary of the kitchen.  'Il est dans le grenier.'

The climb was no more appealing now than the last time he'd been in 23 Rue Chevrefeuille.  Lupin's attic exile kept him well out of the way of anything the family might be up to.  He heard voices, occasionally, loudest at the landing for the second and third storeys, where public rooms and bedrooms seemed likeliest located.  Lucius Malfoy's leather satchell banged against his thigh as he climbed the steps, pausing here and there as he overheated from the unaccustomed exercise.  He was too young to be out of shape.  Hogwarts provided regular exercise so far as walking unending corridors went, but he'd never been athletic and was annoyed to find himself short of breath.  He checked his cuffs and collar as he topped the stairs at last, and with a knock announced himself at Lupin's door.  He depressed the latch, and let himself in.

He'd been right, before, about the set-up.  Lupin knew when he was due, had arranged everything himself.  Two hours was a long time to keep up a distraction, but then Lupin looked well-occupied.

He got a proper look at everything, splayed as they were on Lupin's big brass bed.  Lupin clung to the rail with one fist, the other hand stretched behind him to curl in the Baron's hair.  The Baron's face was pressed between Lupin's naked buttocks, fingers flying on his own prick.  Severus set his bag on Lupin's desk chair, letting it thump on the way down.

'Shit,' Lupin gasped, jerking back.  The Baron scrambled away, grabbing up the twisted bedclothes to shield himself.  His wand, very unlucky, was on the desk, much closer to Severus than himself, but the Baron no more than twitched toward it before he took the lay of the land, and only drew himself up, dignity damned, purple with rage.

'Get out,' he snarled.

'As requested, Lupin,' Severus said.  'My lord.'  He inclined himself in a short bow, and let himself out with no further fanfare.

He intended to depart the house, as well, though natural curiosity and the habits of a spy overtook conscious objective.  He took the first step on the down, so that the stair creaked with his weight, and then stilled.  He trod the outer edge of the step going back up, kept to the wall, and positioned himself just past Lupin's door at the water closet.  He'd noticed earlier they shared a wall, little more than plasterboard.  He set his ear to it.

Voices raised.  Not quite yelling, but fury and accusation.  A sound Severus knew all too well-- a fist hitting flesh, and the peculiar grunt of air forcibly expelled from the body.  It was only a minute later that Lupin's door blew open, slamming wide.  The Baron had enough control not to stomp down the stairs, but he was in a rush, and didn't look about him.  Severus waited for him to round the bend and pass the fourth storey landing before he left the closet.

Lupin was binning a bloody tissue when Severus faced him through the open door.  A faint red streak still marred his upper lip.  Lupin dragged on his shirt and zipped his denims.

'You should charge for it,' Severus said.  'The peep shows in Knockturn Alley run two or three sickles for that.'

'Go to hell,' Lupin retorted, with surprising heat.  He swiped at the red on his face with the back of his hand.  He was shaking.

That made Severus hesitate.  'You said nine to eleven.  I'm sure of it.'

'He came up here.  What was I to do?'

'Are you--'  He didn't know how to ask it.  He didn't want to ask it, but confusion demanded clarity.  'Is he forcing you?'

Lupin laughed.  'No.'

'Then--'  He was angry.  He didn't know quite why, but it surged over him in a wave, bringing a flush of heat to his neck, his cheeks.  'I brought your bloody wolfsbane.  That's nearly eleven months' worth, much as I could get.  We're finished.'

Lupin dragged the bag to the bed by its strap.  He checked beneath the flap, and nodded, one too many times.  He hugged the bag to his chest.  'Yes.  Thank you.  That's more, it's-- generous.  Thanks.'

Severus angled toward the door, but once again instinct stopped him.  'Does the Baron know?'

'Know what?'  Lupin sagged to his mattress.

'About your furry little problem.'

'I believe it's a large part of the appeal.'

'I thought you had to hide it.  I thought that was the point of you needing that,' he said, waving a hand at the satchell.

'Claude's a widower.  Retired.  His son sidelines him, there's no love lost there.  He hasn't told them.'

But he could.  And that would jeopardise Lupin's employment as surely as a bad moon.  Not force, no.  But a threat all the same.

'I'm fed and I'm housed,' Lupin said, perhaps reading his expression of doubt.  'There have to be better reasons to walk away.  It won't last, anyway.  It never does.'

'Then let it be on your own terms.'

'People like us don't set terms.'

'I'm not--'

'Like me?'  Lupin looked away.  'Maybe not.  Thank you.  For what you've done.  It helps.'

Severus rubbed his thumb along the jagged edge of his fingernail.  A sharp pinpoint of discomfort, in counterpoint to the churn of his gut.  He asked, 'Did he do that to your neck?'

Lupin snagged the button at his throat, closing his collar over the sunken purple scar.  'No.  There's nothing for you to do here.'

'That's not a curse scar.'  Lupin inhaled, and Severus overrode him.  'Of all people, I am equipped to recognise one.  You didn't have it before and it's too regular for the transformation, it looks more like--'

'Rope,' Lupin said.  'He didn't do it.  I did it to myself.'

His mind flitted from scenario to scenario.  Rope, a collar, something to restrain himself during the transformation?  It all flashed before him, a catalogue of ever-more insane alternatives until the most obvious truth washed every other possibility away.  Rope about the neck.  Lupin had tried to die.

And hadn't.

When-- was all too obvious, as well.

Severus was suddenly, unaccountably-- sympathetic.  Glad.  Yes, glad.  Someone else knew.  Someone else _knew_ what it was like, grief so oppressive it couldn't be survived.  Except that he had.  They had.

In the silence Lupin seemed to accept he wasn't leaving.  He tucked the satchell away, finally, hid it in a trunk that locked magically and disappeared into the shadow beneath the bed.  He wiped his face again, and then he came to Severus at the door and leant past him to nudge it shut.  He put his arms about Severus' shoulders and pressed their mouths together softly, wetly.

He hadn't come all the way back to Paris to play either substitute or confessor.  But fingers curled in his hair, cupping the back of his head, and it was warmth, and need, and a heartbeat not his own pounding against his chest, and this wasn't about debt, or schemes, or a war.  He'd seen this in Lupin before.  Hitting bottom.  Numb to the consequences.  Severus felt a strange recognition, almost a sense of deja vu, a sense of... comradeship.  He parted his lips, and let Lupin in.

Lupin tasted like the red wine that sat in half-drunk glasses on the desk.  Maybe it made him bold.  He drew Severus to the bed, pushed him down.  There were only candles burning, and with a wave he put them out, wandless magic that flared and then plunged them into darkness.  It took a blink or two to see Lupin in anything but outline, a smudge against the moonlight from the window.  Lupin knelt between his legs, slid a palm over his crotch.  Severus touched the faint scar on Lupin's cheek, dragged a fingertip along that ridge of self-inflicted damage that bisected his neck.  Lupin took his thumb into his mouth and sucked gently.  He applied himself to the line of buttons at Severus' flies, lowered his head to Severus' lap, and brought him to life with slick heat.

His orgasm was slow and hazy, heat lightning rather than a stormy frenzy.  He opened his eyes afterward to find himself lying on his back, the rafters looming overhead.  Lupin tucked in beside him.  Their shoulders grazed.

'Do you want,' Severus asked, throat gravelly with the effort of speaking.

'Do you know how to do?' Lupin replied, not meanly.

'Several practical demonstrations should be sufficient.'

'Oh, several, is it.'

He fumbled out a hand.  Lupin was hard, a ridge of flesh straining the front placket of his trousers.  The zip was only half-familiar, a lifetime ago when Muggle had been as natural as Wizarding robes.  Lupin's prick was alien in his grip, different than his own, but the way Lupin curled into him and kissed him was more alien still.  Hot thighs trembled as he tugged and stroked.  When Lupin seized and shuddered, Severus shivered, as well.  He was awkward, more awkward than Lupin, sliding off the edge of the bed to the cold wood floor.  Lupin squirmed and shoved at his pants, and guided Severus in.  Heavy and surprisingly soft skin.  It must have been all right, though he choked when he tried to do as Lupin had done, take more of it in his mouth.  Lupin soothed him when he coughed, and kissed him, and Severus went back at it more determined.  It wasn't long before Lupin's knees twitched restlessly, hands fisting in the sheet.  Severus sucked in a breath through the nose just as the thing in his mouth went rigid and spurted liquid.  Years of testing dubious potions prompted him to taste, after the surprise of it.  This wasn't like the wine, sour and domestic.  Oily, a little, repellant and intriguing at once.  Lupin pulled him up by the chin and licked it from his tongue.

'It would be so much easier to just hate you,' Lupin whispered.

Yes, Severus thought, but said only, 'Speak for yourself, Remus.'

 

 

**

 

 

It was very late.  Or very early.  He didn't feel tired, when he blinked awake.  His body was heavy, weary.  Lupin's bed was more comfortable this time.

Lupin wasn't in it.  Severus rolled his head to check.  Ah.  At the desk.  Drinking that wine, at last.  The goblets were cut crystal.  Rimmed in gold.  One of his hand-rolled cigarettes produced a steady curlique of smoke whisping upward from a bakelite ashtray.

Severus pulled Lupin's duvet to his chest.  It was cold, in the attic, and the window was frosted over.  He cleared his throat and said, 'What happened to Damocles?'

Lupin blinked at him.  'Who?  Damocles?'

'Samuel Damocles.  You picked him up after the attack, didn't you?'

'No.  I hadn't heard there was an attack.  The Potioneer, you mean?'

'Yes.'  He sat up.  'Albus said he was going to send someone who was already here.  I assumed it was you.  Erroneously, it seems.'

Lupin took a long draw of his cigarette.  'I haven't spoken to Dumbledore in five years.'

'Something happened between you.  What was it?'

'Very simple, actually.'  Lupin tugged the bed fur over the knee he cocked to his chest.  'He took something from me.  He won't give it back.  There's nothing left to say until that changes.'

'What did he take?'

'A memory.'

'You broke with him over a memory?'

'It's mine,' Lupin said.  Smoke twined his fingers.  He stubbed out the cigarette.  'You want any?  Bordeaux.  Everything here is fucking Bordeaux.  The wine cellar here is overrun with it.'

'No.  I don't know.'  His eyes were drooping again, but he felt more content than sleepy.  He had class in the morning.  'No.  What memory?'

Lupin emptied the bottle into his goblet.  'The night it happened.  Where were you?'

'When what--'  He knew, though.  Somehow he knew what Lupin meant.  'It was a full moon,' he recalled.  'Halloween of '81.  It was a full moon.'

'You know Barty Crouch?'  Lupin sipped.  'Senior.  I know you're acquainted with the son.  Crouch sent a team after me.  Arrested me, dragged me through the Grand Hall at Beauxbatons.  I could barely see straight.  Much less walk myself in.  I didn't know what had happened.  But that didn't mean I knew nothing.  Crouch had me thrown in Azkaban.  They held me two weeks before they got round to interrogating me.  It's unknown whether werewolves can be subjected to Veritaserum, you know.  Whether we can lie under its power.  Crouch didn't bother trying.  They took my memory of that night.  That entire week, actually.  They'd have taken more, I think, but there were things in those memories they weren't ready to expose.  The Order.  What I knew, who I'd seen.'  He drank again.  'I suppose Dumbledore convinced Crouch I was innocent.  Functionally.  I don't believe they ever even viewed my memory.  He's persuasive, our Headmaster.'

'Very,' Severus said airlessly.  Dumbledore had performed a similar feat on his behalf.  Dumbledore had probably been powerful enough to put an early end to many of Crouch's show-trials.  All the political power he could have asked for, in the wake of Voldemort's destruction.  If he'd duelled the Dark Lord himself as he'd done Grindelwald, ages ago, there might never have been show-trials at all.  Dumbledore could have filled Azkaban on a whim and his word would have been all the credit needed.  'But I thought you said Dumbledore took your memory.'

'That came later.'  Lupin fell into a meditative silence; when he spoke again, it was almost dreamily, absent all emotion.  'I think he took me to Godric's Hollow.  To see it for myself.  I might have asked him to.  I know it was about a month after Azkaban I did it.  Tried to do it.  There's a treatment record at St Mungo's.  And another a month after that.  I could guarantee being alone at least during the moon, couldn't I.  I think the second time they must have known I'd try it; the scars are unique.  Wood, maybe, like I pried up a bit of floorboard.  All I could get to.'  He touched the inside of his forearm, dragging a fingertip in a long slow line to the elbow.  'I suppose after that Dumbledore tired of trying to stop me.  He took the memory.  All of it.  Everything back to what Crouch started.'  He sipped, and seemed surprised to find his glass empty.  He put it aside with a sigh.

'So... he did it save you,' Severus said.

'So he said,' Lupin mumured.  'Interesting, isn't it, how that can mean so many different things.  Saving someone.  I don't know what he saved me for.  I don't know why he thought it was his place to do it.  All I know is it didn't work.'

'Didn't work?'  Severus sat upright.  'You're not still--'

'Suicidal?' Lupin said calmly.  'No.  It's terrible.  Not being able to grieve.  It's like it's there, or a ghost of it is there.  But they deserve more than that from me.  There's just a hole in me.  They should be there.  But they aren't.  He didn't save me.  The me he left behind is wrong.'

'Wrong enough to leave Beauxbatons?  Wrong enough to deserve whatever that is with the Baron?'

'Oh, yes,' Lupin said.  'I absolutely deserve what's happening with Claude.  But so does he.  Don't worry about that.'  Abruptly he reached across the desk, but instead of the bottle he took up his wand.  With a swish and a muted ' _Tempus_ ' he threw glowing numbers against the dark of the wall.  'You should go back to sleep.  I'll put in a special request with le ministère français de la magie as soon as they open.  We'll need to reconnect the kitchen floo to get you back to Scotland.'

He cleared the tightness from his throat.  'Come back to bed til then.'

'Severus.  That almost sounded fond.'  Lupin stood, hugging his fur tight.  'I think I'll go find another bottle.  Sleep.  I'll wake you, I promise.'

He didn't protest, and Lupin didn't wait for it.  The door closed softly, and Severus, alone, lay back to stare at the ceiling.  Sleep was slow in coming.  It didn't matter.  Lupin didn't return til dawn, anyway.


	5. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
> 
> ~Meditations in an Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

Severus had a surprise awaiting him at the weekend in his private Potions lab.  As a rule, he disliked surprises.  He'd had a lifetime of proof they yielded disastrous results.

Samuel Damocles had made himself quite at home at Hogwarts, and had three, at least, potions in the works, from what Severus surveyed from the door.  Several cauldrons bubbled away over magical flames, and Severus' private store of higher-grade materials had been ravaged, no doubt gleefully.  While his lab could not rival the stores of, say, any of the larger apothecaries, his access to school funds, and the private funds which Dumbledore had occasionally made available, had built a stock of great value.  And this bumbler was making free like a child let loose in Zonko's.

Severus announced himself by saying, 'I am within rights to hex any intruder in my personal quarters.'

Damocles startled, whipping about.  That he relaxed immediately did not bode well; Severus silently wished a hex on Dumbledore, whose lemon drop-smeared fingerprints were all over this set-up.  'Master Snape,' Damocles said, indecently cheery.  'And a good morning to you.  I helped myself, hope you don't mind awfully--'

'I do,' Severus assured him, helping himself to a closer examination of the cauldrons.  'To what do I owe this displeasure?'

'Well, to be honest, I was going a bit mad just sitting still,' Damocles said, resuming his careful mashing of lotus pods.  'Didn't figure you'd mind, professional courtesy and all that.  Old Sluggy used to let me down here for personal projects.'

'Old Sluggy,' Severus repeated, giving that every inflection it deserved, 'is no longer Potions Master of Hogwarts.  As I'm sure he made a point of telling you when you met in Paris.'

'Yes,' Damocles said.  'He did.  Any number of us were curious whereby he came an invitation.'

'He's a respected emeritus of the field,' Severus said smoothly.  'No doubt any number of toadying types provided him a guest pass.'  He stirred the cauldron of Mortius Intinction anti-clockwise, subtly examining the other man beneath lowered lashes.  Samuel Damocles, or, as he'd been in the three years they'd overlapped at Hogwarts, Damocles Sammouel Belby, was a pudgy overfed sort with thinning hair carefully combed over.  Though well-healed, there was a faint greenish tinge to his cheekbone and eye socket, leftover bruising from the attack in his Paris hotel.  He wore a brace on his wrist, as well, only partially hidden by the sleeve of his fine robe. The horrific werewolf-inflicted curse scar of which Horace Slughorn had waxed so eloquent was a faint white line along one cheek, almost identical to the one Lupin had borne after the last full moon, just two days before the Potions expo.

Thinking of the many coincidences that seemed to have originated at that point in time, Severus said, 'I attended your lecture on the Wolfsbane Potion.'

'Did you?  Comments?'

'There is a rumour,' he answered.  The Mortius was, he had to admit, perfectly brewed, and thus he turned his back on it.  'That you were assaulted by the subject of your lecture.'

Damocles had no reason to be so practised at the bland expression of disinterest which overtook his round face.  Yet it was, Severus guessed, well-practised indeed, and an excellent achievement.  He almost believed it.

'I walked in on a bit of a burgle,' Damocles replied lightly.  He chuckled.  'Gave me a horrid fright, but if anything I believe I did a worse turn to the thief.  He squealed like a little girl.'

'Then it was a man?'

'How far did the rumour mill get?'  Damocles emptied his mortar into the fine mesh sieve and sifted the powdered lotus into Severus' nicest rosewood bowl.  'He gave me a knock, running for the door.  Took a bit of a stumble into the wardrobe.  No glamourous injuries here.  I've been thinking I ought to put it about I wrestled him to the floor or something masculine.'

'Then he didn't apparate?  He wasn't a wizard?'

'I hadn't thought about it,' Damocles said so airily and immediately that Severus knew he'd been absolutely aware of what it meant.

'Truly?' Severus pressed.  'Why, I should think it's obvious.  A man who has access to wizarding places but no magic of his own?  A squib, perhaps.  But, given your contact with a particular community at the fringes of wizarding society...  Are you sure you didn't see his face?'

'You're awfully curious, Master Snape.'

'A character flaw.'

Damocles measured three level tablespoons for the cauldron at his elbow, which began to smoke.  A tap of his wand lowered the flame to a small blue glow.  He said, 'I remember your lot.  From the war.'

That was coming to the point, and with a vengeance.  Not even Severus had been aware of all the pies in which Albus Dumbledore kept a gnarled finger.  He didn't pretend to misunderstand, but scowled to demonstrate he was not feeling talkative.  'You should speak to Dumbledore about any--'

'Not his lot. Your lot.'

It took longer than it ought to have to realise.  It had been some years, yes, and he was accustomed to the secret, but then it hadn't been truly a secret, had it?  And the ones who knew the truth had reason to know.

Severus faced him, tucking his hands into the voluminous sleeves of his robe, to touch the wand holstered along his right forearm.  Fool Damocles was, but not unintelligent.  'Whatever you believe you know,' he said, choosing his words with care and saying them with even greater deliberation, in the low tone that never failed to attract and keep the attention of men who had earned a threat, 'I assure you.  It is not the entirety of the story.'

'No, we'd have to go rather farther back for that, I'm sure.'  Damocles brushed his hands and removed the leather apron he wore, Severus' leather apron, and draped it across the stool at his side.  'I brewed a thing or two, per request of individuals who didn't exactly have to request, if you know what I mean.  It's awfully inconvenient to have a reputation.  People know where to find you.  I assume that's how it went for you, in the beginning.  Everyone with an agenda came recruiting anyone with a smidgen of useful talent.  Do you know, I even heard Langdon Laprodogh was approached?  Was that your side or Dumbledore's?'

'Langdon Laprodogh couldn't brew his way out of a flour sack,' Severus muttered sourly.

'Hard to believe he wriggled out of it.  I can only imagine they were satisfied with his product.  Brewing was dangerous business for a few years, wasn't it.  We lost a lot of colleagues during the war.  Ramona Algernon was a friend.  I studied with Angel Sainte-James.  Heilyn Trevelyan was nintey years old.  A true master of the craft.'

Severus blasted the cauldron of Continuous Rain clear across the room, showering the far wall with boiling acid.  'You know just enough to insult people who comprehend far more than you do about who and what was lost in the war,' he snarled.  'I advise you to step carefully, Damocles.  You lucked into a potion that affected the tiniest corner of--'

'You have a reputation for petty shots, you know.'  Damcoles was calm, eerily calm, but for bright spots of red high in his chubby cheeks.  'It wasn't luck, either.  You ought to know.  You made the greatest advancement in the formula.  I spent years on theory alone, I've been working on that potion since my school years.'  He drew a wand, though he was careful to aim it away from Severus.  He banished the ruined potion and cleaned the wall and floor with a murmured 'Scourgify'.

Severus aligned his palms, his fingers.  'If you want accolades, you may show yourself to Dumbledore's office.  Or I could give Old Sluggy a fire-call on your behalf.'

They stared at each other in silence, nothing but the gurgle of stewing potions between them.  A faint sheen of perspiration beaded at Damocles' temples, the open neck of his royal blue robe.  Damocles blinked first.  And his eyes dropped to Severus' arm.  Not the one with which he still held his wand.  The other, where a primly buttoned sleeve hid a faded tattoo that hadn't seen the light of day for six years.

Damocles said, 'I knew he was a werewolf, of course.  No visible curse scar, but he wasn't troubling to hide his condition.  The usual combination of threats and bribes.  He's the one who let slip they had someone on their side trying to modify it.  I know it was you.'

Not the Parisian burgler.  The war, and all its ancient goods and evils.

Severus inhaled.  'Well,' he replied acidly.  'Aren't you clever.'

'I didn't have to be.  There were only so many who'd be good enough, and have the cover to work on it.  It's always been about access, you know.  That's why what you were doing to it was so dangerous.  I tried to explain to them, but that was rather their point.'

'Explain what.'

'It has to be regulated.  It has to be hard to get, harder to make.'

'You've lost me,' Severus said.  'You've spent half a decade deliberately resisting improvements to the Wolfsbane formula?'

'I know the reputation I have, as well,' Damocles murmured, with a small smile.  'But no-one kills a fool who may be useful.  Oh, I am a fool.  I like living, you see.  Even when circumstances make that difficult.  Which brings me to you.  I think you and I need to have a serious conversation.'

'We have nothing to talk about.'

'You are aware someone used their influence to reject your paper for the Expo.  You are likely aware that someone was me.'

He'd assumed agents on Damocles' behalf, actually.  This was an interesting stab at candour.  'I wonder what can your reasoning be?'

'I'm explaining,' Damocles said evenly.  'Foolish pride costs me a little in our professional sphere, but it's no great sin.  It's a decent cover for the real reasons, the reasons our colleagues would detest, would fight.  The reasons that go against what some might consider our professional ethics, to help, to heal, to increase knowledge.  But I have scrubbed myself of bias, I have examined this from every angle, and I have seen the proof with my own eyes.  The Wolfsbane must be inefficient, Snape.  It must rely on expensive and proprietary ingredients, do you understand, it must require an extended brewing time in professional facilities, extensive monitoring by qualified Masters--'

' _Why._ '

'Your work on the potion is exemplary, you know that.  But do you understand what I'm saying to you?  It cannot be portable.  It cannot be simplified.  It cannot be preservable or refined for quality or reproducible with generic and inexpensive materials.  Do you understand me?'

Of course he did.  Having it so sweetly spelled out for him was unnecessary and condescending besides.  'You designed it not to relieve the lycanthropic condition but to bring werewolves into the open where they can be controlled.'

'Not originally.'  Damocles smiled.  Severus did not return it.  'Dumbledore is an interesting man, isn't he?  Lots of interesting theories about the war.  Lots of theories about trials we may face not too far in the future.'

'The Headmaster has always been fond of bedtime stories,' Severus said.  'Clean up after yourself.  If I find so much as a scratch in any of those cauldrons, you may expect a bill by post.'

Damocles' shoulders slumped, just a little.  'Naturally.'

Severus flicked his wand as he passed through the lab's doors.  The thunderous slam was thoroughly gratifying.

 

 

**

 

 

The holiday break was still achingly far away.  The first exams were nearing, however, and the usual uptick in student sincerity was breaking out like a rash.  Severus borrowed an extra pot of red ink for corrections from Pomona Sprout, who used very little out of a typically Hufflepuffian combination of refusal to exercise harsh judgment on the little blighters and an overemphasis on practical exams over theory.  No student would leave Severus' classroom without a thorough grounding in the sciences-- well, not by dint of his own effort, at any rate.  The Board of Directors believed in marking to a curve.  If it yielded entire generations of progressively stupider students, at least the donors could claim in public their little darlings had passed.

When he'd first taken on his teaching position at Hogwarts, he'd had nightly meetings with Dumbledore.  The Order had been far more clandestine than the meetings of the Death Eaters, only daring to gather when public excuses could be made; but there had been a time when he'd lived and breathed the rapidly normative role of spy.  Not even the silence of his own mind had been safe.  If not the Dark Lord, then Dumbledore would be there, tentacles of want in his brain, oozing through his every memory for something to meet their own desire.  He occluded as naturally as he breathed, forcing every ounce of conjecture, imagination, dreaming to the farthest, darkest corner of his soul.  He was a vessel, carrying fact from one place to another, nothing more.

To reconstruct himself in the wake of victory and devastation had been more an act of art than will.  Who was he?  Everything he'd been was wiped away.  There was no joy in Potions, for it was that skill had brought him to the Dark Lord's attention.  There was no hope in teaching, for he had no future after dipping his hands in blood.  Hogwarts was not a home, no refuge, it was a prison in which he served his penance.  For a while, the meetings with Dumbledore had continued, as Dumbledore plumbed him for the smallest article of intelligence which might lock away a former compatriot, or, where needful, protect someone who might prove useful later.  But after the trials had concluded Dumbledore had turned to other pursuits.  At first Severus had been glad, had revelled in his increasing solitude.  He emerged from his quarters for classes and, when ordered to, for meals and staff meetings, but the rest of his time was his own.  In the dark, he was himself.  Whoever that was.

He was an intelligent man.  It took very little time to realise solitude was no blessing.  There was no peace to be had, and he deserved that.

But now, there was something itching at the back of his skull, eating at his gut, worming is way through the deepest recesses where he'd long locked away such youthful toys as wishes.  He did not yet name it, did not yet look it full on, but he knew it was there.

 

 

**

 

 

He emerged from Flourish and Blotts to a fulsome rainstorm.  The battering wind was horrid chill, and the sun had vanished as if it were midnight, not three in the afternoon.  Severus drew the hood of his cloak tight and wrapped his wool scarf high about his nose and mouth to protect himself from chapping.  Even on days like this Diagon Alley was packed with visitors, and he forced his way through the crowd, ducking pokey umbrellas and puddle-splashing shoppers as he made his way up the street.  He breathed a sigh of relief when at last he left the hustle and bustle behind.  He considerately wiped his boots of muck before taking those final steps out of the Alley and into the welcoming warmth of The Leaky Cauldron.

'Ah, Professor Snape,' Tom the barkeep greeted him, beckoning him in.  'You look like a man in need of a warm pick-me-up.'

'Possibly two,' Severus admitted.  Despite his many layers he was frozen through, and damp besides.  He shivered despite himself as he looked for a seat, but he was not the only man to think of escape indoors near the liquor, and the Cauldron was full.  He detested sitting at the bar, not least because it put his back to the door, but every booth was taken by singles using the alternate seat for their wet things.  That he'd planned to the same thing was immaterial; he was irritated.  He scowled as he took a stool at the far end of the bar, and allowed himself to be only slightly mollified that Tom recalled his most usual order and had a glass of Ogden's before him immediately.

'Shh,' Tom said, finger across his moustachioed lips, and dripped another ounce above the fill-line.  'Weather's that awful, int it.'

'It is indeed,' Severus replied, and decided the bar wasn't too terrible, if he only lingered an hour or so.  'I don't suppose I'm in time for tea?'

'A little early, but worth the wait.  Martha's been roasting lamb all day.  You can smell it.'

He could indeed.  Maybe he'd linger long enough for a meal.

The door blew open again, heralding the entrance of a mother and child.  The little one was wailing, and the mother, embarrassed, dragged the child brutally by the wrist.  She paid for the Floo and they departed immediately, to murmurs of relief around the common room.  Severus watched them go.  The child had born a very rosy cheek, red in the shape of an adult's handprint.  Inexplicably his mood plunged darkly, and he took a large swallow of his whiskey.  He breathed through the burn and drank again.

'Excuse me, sir, I wonder if I could take this seat?  The others are in use.'

He gathered his dripping cloak and looked about for a place to put it.  He refused to use the back of his own chair, knowing it mean a soaking shirt, but neither would he accept the floor, which clearly hadn't been swept nearly often enough to be touched by anything but shoes.  There were hooks at all the private booths, of course.  With a grimace, he draped his cloak across his knee.

'Thank you, thank you.'  The woman for whom he'd manoeuvred slid onto the vacated stool, tangled in her own sopping woollens.  Straggling hair of mousy brown trailed over the shoulder of a robe that had probably been silvery grey before it had soaked through.  She had a strong nose, delicate wrists, and he knew her.

She had remembered him, too.  Her mouth curled upward.  'Master Snape,' she greeted him.

'Madamoiselle.'  His tongue stopped working.  Or perhaps his brain.  'I,' he said.

'Anouk Pelletier,' she said, extending her hand, palm down so that he could raise her knuckles to his lips.  He felt a little numb doing so.  'But do you recall me?  We met in Paris at the--'

'Exposition, yes.  But I didn't know your name there.  Then.'

'Then it is good we had a chance to meet again.'  She brushed a string of hair from her cheek.  'Very English weather, yes?'

'Yes.  I suppose it is.'

Silence fell between them.  Tom was busy replacing a spent keg and hadn't noticed the arrival of yet another customer.  'What brings you to London?' Severus asked at last, just as she asked the same.

'Oh,' she said, with a sudden bright laugh.  'Forgive me.  Only I know you must not live here, surely?  You teach at Hogwarts, the Scottish school?'

'It's-- open to all British students, but yes, it is in Scotland,' he said carefully, catching himself on the verge of a stutter, and gathered himself forcefully and manfully and added smoothly, 'And you must not live here either, if you forgive my saying so, if you were caught by surprise.  This weather is very typical for this time of year.'

'Not so different from Paris,' she confessed.  'But in Paris, we would call it beauteous nature, especially if an Englishman were nearby to overhear.'

He hadn't laughed in his entire adult life, but he came close just then, surprised at her wry wit.  'You are droll, Madamoiselle.'

'Anouk,' she reminded him.  'I like to smile.  I think I shall enjoy making you smile as well.'  Tom returned to them then, and she ordered a glass of the mulled wine Tom kept warm in a cauldron behind the bar.  'Shall we toast?' she asked Severus, turning to face him directly with her goblet raised.

'To what are we toasting?'  He caught up his glass and hesitated.  Some schoolboy instinct warned him against cruel tricks; another even more cynical part of himself warned against schoolboy crushes.  'To new acquaintances,' he said.

Anouk-- Madamoiselle Pelletier-- blinked at his suddenly cool tone.  She recovered admirably, touching her glass to his.  'The first time you meet someone, Master Snape, you are acquaintances.  The second time, you have a bit of an understanding.  By the time we meet again, we will be old hats.'

'We'll be old hats?'

'Yes,' she said firmly, and clanked their glasses again.  'I've read your article, you know.  Well, all your articles.'

Despite himself, he wavered.  'At least two didn't circulate in Europe.'

'Oh, and nothing can be read in a library?'  She sipped archly.  'Myself, I have a focus in toxicology.  You are familiar with Ibn Wahshiyya?  He was an alchemist.  Ninth century.  I wrote my Masters' thesis on his _Book of Poisons_ , the influence of astrology on the ancient study of toxins.  Much mythology, you know, the Egyptians in particular.  Will you pretend to be interested in this long enough for me to finish our drinks?  Perhaps even supper?'

He blinked.  'I-- Supper?  With me?'

Anouk propped her chin on her hand.  'Does this surprise you, that someone would want to spend the evening with you?'

'It surprises me that you would contrive to run into me in London under some pretence, yes, that surprises me.'

She laughed.  'For intelligent conversation, one must travel as needed.'

'And even an Englishman will do in the dire straights,' he said drily.

Anouk examined the colour of her wine in the light of the candle that flickered between them.  'When men say they enjoy an intelligent woman, they say it as a thing of amazement.  They are astonished to find such a rare prize.  For me it is the same, yes.  I meet a man with two brains to rub together, and me, I think, _belle surprise!_   I would make a floo trip for that.'

'So I'm an intelligent man?' he prodded, and she smirked pertly.  'You think to turn my head with flattery.'

'This is also a thing men like, I find.  Tell me I have not offended you?'

He opened his mouth for a smart reply, and checked himself.  'No,' he said slowly.  'No, I'm not offended.  Just a little...'  With a harsh mouthful of whiskey to brace himself, he rallied.  'I would, yes.  Be pleased to treat you to supper, and, I would be very much interested in hearing more about your thesis.'

'Most excellent.'  They toasted again, and she propped her little chin on her fist.  'A little chitting chat to begin?  How is your friend, Master Damocles?'

Ah.  That wasn't the shoe he'd expected to drop, but a sharp kick his tongue tripped off in retaliation.  'If you'd rather a conversation with him, I can arrange an introduction.  _Monsieur_ Damocles the kind of man to enjoy a little flattery.'

Anouk merely regarded him steadily, thoughtful green eyes keen on his.  'I cannot tease you, can I,' she mused at last.  'That's a shame.  I think we would have a little fun with that.  I would like to have a little fun.'  She raised her wine to her lips and drank slowly.  'My husband,' she said then.  'He was a serious man, like you.'

Severus hesitated.  'Your husband?'

'Henri.  We were not married long.  It was a whirlwind romance,' she murmured, with a little loop of her goblet through the air.  'When you are young and foolish it is easy to think every obstacle can be conquered through the greatest magic of all.'

'I... I don't follow.'

'Amour,' she said simply, and looked up at him again.  'I am less young and, I hope, less foolish now.  So perhaps we start again, yes?  We say something small about the weather...'

Her dangling hint hung there.  His choice, to play along, or to allow things to end naturally.  She wouldn't invent another errand in London, he was sure.  And if he walked away now he'd lose nothing, for he had nothing as it stood.  He'd go back to Hogwarts no richer or poorer, having no way of knowing what a single rainy night of conversation would bring for the future.  But the only person who'd ever given him a second chance was Albus Dumbledore, and much as he valued his life at Hogwarts, Albus was rather too old and bearded to make up for the frank gaze of a woman who wanted to be in his company so badly she'd paid international floo rates in the middle of winter.  Severus was hot-tempered and quick with a grudge, but he wasn't stupid.

He sipped his whiskey.  'In Scotland it's been full snow for two weeks already.'

A hint of pearly teeth vanished as she buried her smile in her goblet.  'I find winter conducive to my studies, don't you?  The serenity and quiet are masterful aids to the concentration required of a difficult brewing.'

'Very well said, Madamoiselle.'

'Anouk,' she said gently, and presented her hand again, but this time when he took it she held him, squeezing his fingers in her warm palm.  'Although, my friends call me Bichette.'

Doe.  It was the word for doe.  It took his breath away, just a little bit.  'Severus,' he managed, airless.  'I wonder if you might, ah, join me for supper.  I should be most-- pleased.'

'I can think of nothing I would like more.'

He forced his mouth to curve upward, and held it til it felt almost natural.  'Excellent.'


	6. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to.
> 
> ~Meditations in an Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

Lupin meandered, his steps aimless and slow.  He walked Bouzillé Alley with no apparent goal in mind but the exercise, which was necessarily brisk with winter at last descending.  The little boy in his arms had fallen into a torpor as the grey afternoon lengthened, resting his small head on Lupin's shoulder and occasionally sucking his thumb.  The little girl often skipped ahead, though Lupin was not so lost to his dreaming that he forgot to mind her.  She had a bright piping voice that carried over the noise of the crowd.  She'd come running, exclaiming about this or that, and Lupin would answer in his mild way.  'English,' he'd say, sometimes, but then they'd converse at some length in French, and the girl would pirouette and flounce away, chasing some new thing of interest, and Lupin would smile his small smile, watching her.

It was a postcard picture, the tutor and his charges, and no matter how long he watched it Severus had yet to find anything wrong with it.

Yet he remained convinced there was, in fact, something wrong.  He had not been a spy for nothing, and his over-trained nerves were all but singing with conspiracy.  The pieces were accumulating, small clues in what he was increasingly sure was a grim puzzle.

First clue: the new scar on the back of Lupin's hand, between the second and third knuckle, a split nearly to the bone that gleamed pink, unhealed, nearly a week after the last full moon.  It was much like the scar Lupin had borne on his cheek, when they'd first met at the Potions Expo.  A curse scar, inflicted by a werewolf on its own body, as the mad creatures did when deprived of the Wolfsbane Potion that allowed them to retain their human minds.

Second clue: he was sure Lupin had told him he had a contact to make the Wolfsbane Potion.  It was only access to the ingredients that restricted him, and Severus had solved that in some measure, by providing the wolfsbane.

Lupin should not have had such a scar.  Lupin should not have had any such scars.

Severus tugged the hood of his cloak lower against the wind.  It bore the damp smell of a coming rain, and with it the dank centuries of peat smoke and alley trash, much as Diagon Alley did.  The French addition was an undertone of sour wine, inescapable.  Diagon Alley had a certain quaint appeal, like Hogwarts, or so it had always seemed to Severus, whose half-breed childhood had created an indelible longing for the overtly, even celebratorily magical.  Bouzillé Alley was just a thoroughfare, workingman in tenor, dingy with only the accidental ornament of the miraculous.  Not here the Napoleonic excesses of beauty and grace.  Yet it suited Lupin, even as he carried those gorgeous children with him.  He looked a little ragged, a little too worn.  He was not out of place, here, and yet there was something very wrong.  Severus was sure of it.

He left his snooping and stepped into the Cafe de Rouen.  They'd met here twice, and Bichette delcared it perfect for clandestine rendezvous.  Candeliers of flickering candles lit booths of age-polished oak, and the wine was-- so Bichette told him-- of very nearly acceptable vintage.  He liked it for the way the golden glow lit the grooves of her smile.  Bichette liked to smile.  He was a challege, she had told him more than once, and he liked that, too.

He sat at the table they'd informally claimed as theirs, draping his heavy cloak across the bench.  Lupin and his mysteries could wait.  He caught the eye of the bartender, and ordered a bottle of wine-- not bordeaux, he thought, and then firmly decided he would think no more of Lupin at all tonight.  Cotes du Rhone red.  He fussed with the glasses, aligning them with the edge of the chequered tablecloth.  He looked up to the bell clanging against the opening door, prepared to, perhaps just this once, smile himself, and very much did not.

It was Lupin.  With the children.  And, following rather doggedly behind, the Baron d'Armagnac.

Severus went unnoticed for approximately six seconds.  The little boy was fast asleep, dangling limply from Lupin's hip, drool forming a dark patch on Lupin's denim shoulder.  The Baron led the older girl by hand, til she broke away to run to the bar, climbing a stool in a ferocious leap.  A quick flick of the Baron's wand banished the muddy prints she left on the seat of her chosen chair.

Severus hesitated, and that was his undoing.  He made to rise, stopped, turned away, stopped.  The door opened again.  Bichette, arriving, in the French way, in the general neighbourhood of the time they'd agreed upon, and she lit up on seeing him.  She cheerfully hollered his name, and Severus was already wincing as Lupin's head arose, almost as if he were scenting the air.  Lupin looked directly at him.

Bichette kissed both his cheeks and shed her damp cloak and gloves and unpinned her chignon in a lazy whirlwind of activity that ended with her sinking into the seat Severus held for her.  'Ah, the wine is poured,' she observed, sweeping up a goblet to sniff.  'How lovely.  We are getting rather accomplished at this business, yes?'

'It would appear so.'  Lupin was staring at him.  Severus glared back.  He seated himself.  Lupin shifted the boy into his lap, as the Baron snapped his fingers for the bartender and began an interrogation about a meal.

'I brought the book we discussed,' Severus said, setting the volume on the table.  'It wasn't quite as much material as I thought, but the section on Egyptian archaeology does have a reference to exotic flora discovered in what they believed to be an apothecary's domicile.'

He knew the glint of scholarly delight in her eyes was real.  He'd felt that himself, here and there.  He did not mind at all that she eagerly and immediately turned to the mark he'd left between the pages, setting in to read right in front of him.  He quite enjoyed watching the play of emotion on her face-- studious attention, first, a thoughtful frown lining her forehead, pursed lips on a soundless disagreement, the triumph of being proved correct in something she already thought.  She glanced up at last for him, and smiled.

'Ah, but this is perfect,' she said simply.  'Thank you, Severus.'

'I'm only glad I was able to locate it so readily,' he replied, through the odd quickening thrum of his pulse.  He inclined his wine toward her and sipped.

Bichette snapped the monograph closed and sat back in her bench.  The goblet turned this way and that as she rotated the stem between her long fingers.  'And your school?' she asked.  'Your little hordes of learners?'

'Holidays,' Severus said, allowing himself a touch of asperity.  'Through Christmas and New Year.'

'Then you are free for a week or two?'

'Just over four, actually.  I know it's different at Beauxbatons--'

'I am sure the instructors are very jealous.'  Bichette laughed.  'Very sure.'

'It does disrupt the academic year considerably.  And we functionally lose the week before and the week after the break, with the children too excited to pay attention in classes.  I've considered advocating for a shorter holiday, but...'  He lifted one hand in a mimic of the Gallic shrug she was making even now.  'But in all honesty I enjoy the lengthy escape from duties.'

'Excusez-moi.'

Severus set his jaws.  Bichette was not so forewarned to expect something awful, and turned in polite curiosity.  It was not Lupin, who sat at the bar now with the children wearing the look of a man watching the apocalypse drift near, but the Baron.  He looked especially fine, in an elegant Regency tailcoat in black and gold pinstripe.  He inclined his top half in a sort of bow to Bichette, who provided a hand, palm down, prompting the Baron to brush his bearded chin over the air just above her fingers.

'Forgive my interruption,' the Baron murmured in his smooth English.  'Though I am not acquainted with you, Madamoiselle, I recognised Professor Snape and wished to offer greetings.'

Severus shook the offered hand briefly.  'My Lord,' he said.  'May I present Madamoiselle Anouk Pelletier.'

The Baron nodded to her, and swivelled his beetle-black eyes to Severus.  'I hope the season finds you well, Professor.'

'Tolerably,' Severus said.  The Baron's tone indicated anything but well-wishes.  'And yourself, my Lord?  The children must be excited for Christmas.'

There was a slight softening of that grim exterior.  The Baron looked back at his grandchildren, though it seemed to Severus he was really looking at Lupin.  'We are ordering a meal.  Perhaps you would join us.  They are preparing a room for us in private.'

'No, I shouldn't think--'

Bichette dropped her hand over his.  'You are kind to offer,' she interrupted.  'Thank you, we would be pleased.'

Severus glowered.  It was difficult enough to get away for any stolen hours, he did not want to spend them in stilted conversation with a man of this calibre.  Then again, it might be prime observational opportunity.  And a meal he wouldn't be expected to pay for, with a teacher's salary.

'Very kind,' he said hollowly, and reluctantly rose to gather their outerwear.

Lupin unsurprisingly fell into step with him.  'Sorry,' he offered.  'I did try to talk him down.'

They were being escorted by the bartender down a short stairwell to an underground dining area.  The room had a cozy overstuffed feel, a large and impressively solid dining table being laid with plateware by a uniformed maid who levitated platinum pieces from a cart, to the delight of the children.  The Baron was seated immediately at the head of the table, and he imperiously arranged everyone else to his taste, placing Lupin at the other end, Severus and Bichette to the left, and the children to his right, though the little boy ignored this and climbed into Lupin's lap again.

'We have not met,' Bichette said, favouring Lupin with one of her bright smiles, and extending her hand.

Lupin seemed to regard her with a strained demeanour.  It took him rather a long moment to return her kind gesture, and then he pressed her hand only limply.  'Remus Lupin,' he mumbled.

'And how are you related to the Baron?' Bichette went on.  'Brother?  A charming uncle, perhaps, to these lovely children?'

'Remus is a scholar as well,' the Baron said, flicking his lace napkin into his lap and waving the bartender near with a bottle of champagne for his examination.  'Though not as well-known as he ought to be.  I have chided him to mind his publications, but...'  He waggled his fingers as if to indicate Lupin had proved slippery.  'It is the privilege of our family to retain him for the instruction of my grandchildren.'

Lupin and the Baron locked eyes.  Third clue, Severus thought, though he knew even less where in the puzzle it fit.  There was an odd heavy grimness to the long look they exchanged.

'My lord is generous,' Lupin said, a very long time later.  'Over-generous.  Delphine, no wine.  Milk for the children,' he asked the maid, 'merci.'

'Oh, let her try some.'  The Baron gave the girl his own glass, murmuring for her to sip.  Blushing prettily, she sipped the bubbly champagne, and coughed delicately.  The Baron laughed indulgently and ruffled her yellow hair with a tender hand.  'No, no, one sip, ma chère.  Professeur Lupin will scold us.  Milk for supper.'

A hand curled over Severus' wrist.  Bichette.  She arched a bemused brow at him.  He turned his palm upright, and she interlaced their fingers.  There was a flutter in his gut, and he buried his nose in his champagne as soon as it was poured for him.  Bichette reached for her glass with her left hand, the better to keep hold of his with her right.

The meal was excellent, chicken braised in mustard and white wine, pate and pickle, gratineed scallops served in the shell.  There was more wine, a refreshing pinot gris, and port with the chocolate mousse dessert, and Severus was feeling rather warm under his collar.  Conversation, though stilted, eventually wound its way through weather and holiday plans to politics and thence back to the safe ground of favoured holiday resorts.  Lupin said perhaps seven words over the course of two hours, and those entirely to the children.  The boy, Germaine, had regained some energy after being plied with chicken from Lupin's plate, and Lupin kept him amused by playing a game of concentration, a minor exercise in control of youthful magic.  Germaine was roundly applauded by the Baron when he succeeded in turning a candleflame a vivid green.

'A Slytherin in the making,' Severus observed.  'That's the exact shade.'

Lupin did not look up.  'Beauxbatons eschews the houses,' he said, cool if polite, and Severus scowled.

The hour was nearly nine when they had finished their meal.  Severus, who had intended to return to Hogwarts for a night of study, gave up the hours as lost, and tried to pretend he was not content with spending the time sneaking touches beneath the table with Bichette, who twined her small finger with his at intervals he could not predict.  Lupin's coldness he thought he understood, since the Baron obviously knew they knew each other, and Severus was fairly sure the invitation to dinner was solely for the purpose of ascertaining whether he and Lupin had a romantic connexion.  It was surely not lost on the Baron that Bichette's attentions were returned.  If the Baron's more expansive mood were anything to judge by, then Severus would judge him pleased by the show he'd been witnessing.  It didn't answer for everything odd about Lupin-- this close, he confirmed the wound on his knuckle was definitely a curse-scar, and there was one beneath the sleeve of his shirt, inflamed.  The Baron had acquired two apple-sized spots of red on his cheeks, and a slight slur in his voice; he'd begun to forget to translate himself to English and spoke almost exclusively to Bichette.  Then, abruptly, he rose, swaying just slightly before steadying himself.

'My thanks for your company this evening,' he told them.  'Remus, the children should be in bed.'

Lupin was on his feet so immediately that Severus assumed Lupin had somehow signalled for an exit.  He hoisted Germaine to his hip and collected Delphine, who blinked sleepily and clung to his hand.  'A pleasure,' he said shortly.

'The pleasure was ours,' Bichette replied, more warmly than it warranted, and Severus held her chair so she could stand.  The Baron bowed again over her hand, and Lupin leant over the table to shake her hand as well.  For very nearly the first time all evening, Lupin met someone's eyes; the stare he levelled at Bichette was a thousand miles long.

He's jealous, Severus realised suddenly, clue number four clicking into place.

'We wish you good evening,' Bichette said, innocent of the byplay, and just like that the strange night came to a close.

 

 

**

 

 

'My dear young man.'  Dumbledore was at his avuncular best, firm without being stern and kind without being overbearing.  Severus had given him a solid number of years in which to practise his act, after all.  'I must put my foot down,' Dumbledore said, shaking a finger.  'Your employment contract did specify a certain amount of enforcable comity with your fellow instructors.  The Christmas feast is non-negotiable.'

Severus pulled a face.  'A quiet evening, I beg you, Albus.'

'Test me, Severus, and it will be New Years as well.'

'And what rag-tag group of misfits are in attendance this year?  Which Ministry rejects and homeless ragamuffins will grace Hogwarts' Great Hall?'

'The invitations went out just this morning,' Dumbledore said, smiling beneficently.  'Sturgis Podmore, of course, he's a regular at our little dos, and Minerva's cousin will attend this year--'

'The Swedish hag?'

'I believe Agata prefers _hagzusa_ ,' Dumbledore corrected.  'We will also have Sybil this year-- she may be in a delicate temper, you know, as this will be her first Christmas after her divorce.'  His voice dipped in a Victorian hush over the verboten word, though he was worldly enough to make no further comment.  Severus, who harboured a particular dislike for Sybil Trelawny entirely unrelated to any role he might have played in ensuring either her employment alongside him at Hogwarts or the success of her only true prophecy, pulled an even greater face at this news, glowering resentfully at the cauldron he was stirring as Dumbledore prattled.  He had scrubbed his entire laboratory after Damocles cluttered everything so carelessly; well, he'd used two convenient detentions to ensure it was scrubbed, and the Hufflepuff especially had been very thorough.  Still, the vague sense of disruption and disturbance still lingered, if only in his mind.

He tuned in to Dumbledore again on the name 'Alastor, he's retiring next year, you know, although I believe he threatens retirement every year this time--'

'Perhaps I might invite someone,' Severus said, turning the stirring rod against the lip of the cauldron and letting it drip dry.

Dumbledore was, perhaps, just slightly off his guard.  A tentative smile curled his lips upward before he caught himself.  'I should be delighted.  A special someone?'

'A colleague.'

'Ah.  Well, anyone you care to invite is welcome, of course.'  Dumbledore rocked on his heels, fiddling with the tie in his beard.  'A female colleague?  No, no, none of my business, I'm sure, although I will of course see for myself Christmas.  I'm sure it will be a most pleasant surprise.'  He beamed.

'I beg of you,' Severus said, as serious as he had ever been.  'Do.  Not.  Make.  A.  Scene.'

'I'm sure I have absolutely no idea to what you refer,' Dumbledore replied, and Severus closed his eyes, sure he would regret this, for Dumbledore was likely being completely honest.  'Well, let us anticipate a lovely evening, then, and so for now I will leave you to your work.  Do try to escape the dungeon every few days.  A little Vitamin D, you know.'

'I shall do no such thing.'  He doused the flame and used the gold ladle to decant the potion into the cloth-covered sieve.  'Albus... if I say something rather foolish...'

'We are friends,' Dumbledore said, as if that were answer enough.  Severus supposed it was, and that it was why he'd allowed himself to speak at all.

So he dared just a little more.  'This is what we were fighting for, isn't it.  It's... it's good, now.  Or at least-- it's good enough.'

The old man inhaled deeply.  He used the blot rag to catch an errant drip that splashed from Severus' sieve, and replaced it gently.  'It is good enough,' he said softly.  'You are quite right to say so.  It is good enough, for now.'

'For now.'

'What is it Alastor is always saying?  Vigilance,' he murmured, only a beat ahead of Severus, who said it in time with him.  'It is our sad lot to keep an eye on prevailing winds.  But... for now... it is good.  I'm glad you are here to remind me, my boy.'

'That does place us in an unusual position.  I'm not generally the optimist between us.'

Dumbledore chuckled.  'No, it is not usual.  And, as such, it is an exceedingly wonderful experience.'  He patted the table.  'Christmas.  And your colleague.  Wear your dancing shoes.  A kicky little jazz beat to compliment the rum punch?  What is syncopation, after all, but staggering unevenly from bar to bar?'

'Albus.'

'Off I go, then,' Dumbledore said, and let himself out with a little swirl of the hem of his vermilion sateen robes.

Bichette emerged when she was sure it was safe-- he'd seen her lingering through the door to his sitting room.  Her hair was loose over one small shoulder, her robe clasped indifferently at her slim waist, so that it fell open at her bare throat, a tantalising vee of white skin.  She was unbearably beautiful to him.

He could not say as much, however, so he only let her snag him near, her blunt nails tripping a tickling path along his ribs.  She kissed him beside his mouth, and stood leaning on his support as she glanced over his work on the lab table.  She took up a sprig of bergamot, twirling the purple flower beneath her nose.  'You're not planning to work all night?' she asked.

'I have hardly had a full night's work in a week,' he pointed out.  'I'm behind on my winter brewing.  I owe a double batch of bruise balm and a new year's supply of common antidotes.  The students are shockingly prone to accidental poisoning.'

'Are poisons so common here at Hogwarts?' Bichette wondered, turning her green eyes up to his.  'Just laying about oh so temptingly?'

'Oh, usually related to rule-breaking or skiving of some kind.  Accidental-on-purpose.'

'Accidental on--'  She repeated it with a little moue of consideration.  'I like this English.  Accidental on purpose.  I shall remember that.'

'When would you find use for it?' he wondered, shaking the sieve and removing the wet cloth with its collection of sediment.  He laid a dry cloth over the bowl and set it carefully aside.  'That will sit overnight.  You do nothing accidentally, I'm convinced.'

'Nor you.'  He faced her, and she stroked the flower along his sleeve, lingering on his forearm.  He said nothing about it, knowing it was, despite what he'd just said, entirely accidental, for Bichette couldn't know the Dark Mark lay dormant beneath her innocent touch.  Though they'd achieved certain intimacies, he'd taken care to keep it covered.  No, he did nothing accidentally.  Foolishly, sometimes.  He'd had all the naivete burnt out of him by the war.

He lifted a lock of hair away from Bichette's cheek.  'Will you come?' he asked her.  'For Christmas Eve.'

Her eyelashes quivered, though she did not blink.  'Christmas Eve?  Here?'

'There's a feast.  Staff and those few students who remain during the holidays.  It is-- it is quite wonderful,' he said.  'And-- and I should like for you to be my especial guest.  If you haven't any other plans,' he added, realising with a sinking feeling that her lack of reaction might cover for just that, plans with family, though he hadn't ever heard her speak of parents and knew her husband was no longer a factor.  'It's late to make this request, I should have thought sooner, but then I wasn't sure you would--'

'Of course I will come.'  Bichette squeezed his arm.  'Christmas Eve is perfect.  I will come, yes.  I am glad you wish to ask me.'  She smiled, though it seemed to lack a little of her natural playfulness.  'But no gifts,' she said, and tucked the stem of bergamot over her ear.  'I detest gifts.'

'Me as well,' he agreed, relieved.  He hadn't even thought of that.  He was pleased with her practicality and lack of sentiment.  'Then I shall look forward to it.'

'And I.'  She smiled again as his hands settled at her waist.  'You are done for the evening, yes?  You can stop paying so much attention to your potions and start paying attention to your dinner date?'

Their kiss was tentative, at least on his side.  Gentle, from her.  She tweaked his long nose, and laughed at his mortification.  'Then come pay me the proper attention,' she breathed, and led him back to his quarters by the hand.

 

 

**

 

 

The note arrived by owl at half ten.  Severus had of course not been at breakfast, so it was delivered by house elf, left sitting-- pointedly-- on a tray of scones and jam at his workbench.  Severus poured a pot of steeping Earl Grey over a slice of lemon and broke the seal on the tri-folded parchment.

_I wonder if you would do me the courtesy of a visit.  I have presumed to arrange the international floo hook-up in the kitchen again, this evening at nine._

It was unsigned, but he knew the hand.  Remus Lupin.

Severus ran the gamut on reactions to that; irritation at yet another interruption of his work, surprise that Lupin would in fact presume so far, suspicion as to why he might do so now.  He had not forgot that look on Lupin's face, at dinner with the Baron.  If this was some kind of gambit, it could not succeed, and Lupin surely knew better.  He felt, last, a small premonition of disquiet.  There might be another, related reason for Lupin to reach out.  Perhaps the Baron's amourous attentions had taken a turn for the desperate.  If Lupin were friendless, he might try for help from the only person who'd ever offered it, even if, as Lupin himself had observed, they expiated every debt which might call a favour owed.

Against his better judgment, Severus went.

23 Rue Chevrefeuille was still active, though the house elves took his sudden appearance with greater equanimity than before.  He found his own way up the creaky stairs to the attic room, led by candlelight at each landing, and knocked at the door.  No-one answered, so he knocked again, and tried the latch carefully, dreading what he'd walk in on now.  But the room was dark, and empty, and he stood there wondering.

A huff and a stomp on the stair brought him back to the landing.  Lupin, chuffing his way up, sweat at his brow and the collar of his dingy white shirt askew.  'Sorry,' he called up, from two landings below.  'I was with Delphine and forgot the time.  You mind coming back down?  I've ordered tea for the drawing room.'

It was not tea that awaited them, but a mellow whiskey in silver-rimmed glasses.  Lupin grimaced when it touched his lips, leaving a red mark, and unceremoniously dumped after-dinner mints from a bowl and drank his whiskey from that.  He slumped low in an overstuffed leather chair, laying his head back on the cushion and sending his long legs out at sharp angles on the Persian rug.  He glared up at the stuffed head of a slightly cock-eyed elk that decorated the wall.

'Are you well?' Severus asked carefully.

'Dark of the moon this week,' Lupin answered.

He had nearly forgot that.  'Is that why you look as though you've run a marathon?'

'You know I've really got no words for you right now.'

'You invited me,' Severus said, annoyed.

'I'm sorry.  Yes.'  Lupin passed a hand over his eyes.  'Severus.  I'm going to say something which will be overly vague and unavoidably threatening and you'll want to toss me out on my head for it, but I have to.  You shouldn't be alone with that woman.'

Whatever he'd expected, it was not this.  'Which woman?'

'The woman you were with that day.'

'I beg your pardon,' Severus said coldly.  'That is quite enough of that.'

'But do you understand me?  You shouldn't be--'

'As I've been alone with you?'

Lupin paled.  'Yes,' he said quietly.  His fingers left the arms of his chair to twine in his lap.  'Yes, well.  You're right.  I don't know how you figured us out, but--'

'You're not especially subtle.  Remus,' he said, sitting forward on his own chaise and affecting an indifferent mein, the kindest he could be.  'This is my fault.  I've always assumed you strong enough to hold yourself back from any untoward attachments.'

Lupin's brows drew together.  'What?'

'I would rather not be cruel.'

'Would you rather make sense?'

'Remus.'

'Stop saying my name.'

'I thought you preferred me to use your name.'

Lupin shoved to his feet.  'You are the utter limit.  Damn it, this is not-- not going the way I wanted this to go.'  He splashed more whiskey into his mints bowl.  'Please hear me.  You may be in danger, and I haven't got a way to fix this.  I'm trying, but-- but.  All right, well.  You'll listen, then?'

'I will not, not unless you have a real reason.'

'A real reason other than you being in danger?'

'Name this danger.'

'I can't.'

'You mean you won't.'

Lupin swallowed viciously, draining his drink.  'If you like.'

'I don't like.  I don't like being dragged out of Hogwarts at all hours of the night to listen to your pathetic ranting.  I have humoured this quite enough.'  Severus stood.  'I accept my fault in this.  I'll take my leave.  Do not contact me again.'

'Severus--'

'What have you done with the wolfsbane?'

Lupin came up short at that.  He didn't speak, not even to deny it.

'The full moon falls on Christmas evening.  You should have had two doses of the Wolfsbane Potion by now.  You haven't had any in some time, though, have you had?  So what did you do with it?  I gave you enough for nearly a year.'

Lupin's mouth was set, his eyes remote.  'I can't make you believe me, but I wish you would.'

Severus sneered despite his determination not to.  'Good night, Lupin,' he said, and walked out with nothing further.


	7. Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
> 
> ~Meditations in an Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

Minerva reached as he passed, not quite snagging his sleeve.  When Severus turned an enquiring eye upon her, she did something she delighted in doing, and surprised him.  She smiled softly.

'She's lovely,' Minerva said.  'I'm glad for you, Severus.'

'If she's lovely, surely you should be congratulating her on her accomplishments.'

'Faint heart never won fair lady.'

Their House rivalry didn't answer for this bizarre exchange.  'Faint heart is the least accusation I have ever faced,' he murmured.

The web of wrinkles on her stern face creased into a cheshire grin.  'No doubt,' she replied, and this time she did touch him, very lightly, on the shoulder.  'Happy Christmas, dear.  I don't think this year I must remind you to enjoy it.'

She was a cat, and he might have played mouse, as he had in years past, evading her claws.  It was not a deadly game they played between them, not truly, but it was a game, and he was not a man who liked to lose.  Still-- still, even retreat could be strategic at times.  Severus covered her hand, for the moment it took to step out of her reach.  He curved his mouth just slightly upward, and inclined his head to Gryffindor's head.  'No,' he answered.  'I don't believe you must.'

Her soft chuckle echoed across the Great Hall like a whisper.  Bichette awaited him by the grand tree, looking up at the winking ornaments of crystal and gold.  She touched the tip of her finger to an emblem of embossed silver, the Serpent of Slytherin.  'This looks mediaeval,' she guessed, inquisitive eyes on his face.

'Likely,' Severus allowed.  'Hogwarts is over a thousand years old, and it resists change.  Rather, it accumulates its own history.'

Bichette looked at him.  'You have the soul of a mystic.'

'You insult me, Madam.'

She smiled.  It was that slow sly smirk he liked on her, warming her eyes with challenge.  'The earliest meaning was to conceal, you know.  In the Greek.'

'I have no interest in the mysteries.  Only in the here and now.'

Bichette linked her arm with his.  'Then let us, here and now, go home, yes?'

Home.  He did not need Minerva to remind him to value the small things, either.  Something suspiciously like a heart beat faster in his chest.

An hour later they reclined together on his narrow bed.  Bichette's head tucked beneath his chin, and though they neither spoke nor moved he craved no other stimulation.  They had a bottle of wine open on the bedside table, two glasses half-drunk, and it was just past midnight.

He said, 'Thank you.'

She tilted her head to look up at him.  Her hand settled, warm, on his arm, stroking a path from his wrist to his elbow.  She said, 'When we met I did not expect there to be any sweetness in you.'

'I will disappoint you, if you have changed your mind.'

'You do not think kindness and honour can grow even in unfertile soil?'

The fire was burning low.  He levitated another log from the basket, and flame sparked and renewed.  'If the root is poisoned, the stem will wither.'

'Or the flower will adapt and grow thorns.'  Her palm curled over the dormant Dark Mark beneath his sleeve.  He stopped her, and lifted her hand to his mouth to kiss.

'A garden of thorns is no garden at all,' he said.

'Then someone must tend the garden.'

For a moment he might have thought her a Legilimens.  The way she stared into his eyes, unblinking, was both invasion and invitation.  He did not even recognise his own shields until she smiled, and he had to think to interpret it.  He touched the soft hairs of her eyebrow, curved in a perfect arch.  'Your eyes are green,' he said, to answer the question she did not ask.

'They are.'  She looked away, then, and rested on his shoulder.  Her sigh was weary, her pulse thready.

'Are you well?'

'Too much wine.  A little headache.'

'You could stay, tomorrow, if you feel poorly.  Today.'

'I go to see my aunt in Toulouse.  She is elderly.  The only family I have anymore, since my husband.'

'Then you must,' he supposed, telling himself he was not disappointed.  'Sleep.  You'll want to be well-rested to see her.'

They spoke no more, and he did sleep, but not til the fire had died low again.

 

 

**

 

 

The gale began on Christmas night.

The rain and wind battered Hogwarts' old stones as if it meant to bring them down. The white blankets of snow that had draped the grounds vanished into slush, so that even Hagrid and his huge hound were in danger of the muck. The dungeons were entirely frozen, and it seemed to Severus that every crack in the walls widened an inch to let the wet through. Argus Filch was in high dudgeon, stumping about the castle dragging his bucket and mop to attack the relentless puddles that formed in every corner, grumbling all the way.

Severus was morose as the sky was grey.  An unprecedentedly large number of students had remained at the school for the holiday, and though he had barely crossed paths with them throughout December he now found their presence in his school intolerable.  They were underfoot at every turn, giggling and hollering and generally carrying on like first years.  Worse, they had Peeves the Poltergeist in a state of agita, and that was dire news indeed.  Severus dispensed three detentions before breakfast, took a truly parsimonious number of points-- Minerva would scowl about it being Christmas, and he had no idea how she'd ever learnt who Ebenezer Scrooge was, being Pureblood, but he resented the name-calling when he had actually been minding his fairness for once-- and spent the entirety of the dinner hour coaxing and threatening til Peeves vacated the belfrey.  He was nearly faint with exhaustion when he at last retreated to his suite, determinedly grumpy, and even more determined not to emerge til New Year.

He settled himself on his sofa, summoned his book and lit the nearest lamp with an irritated flick of his wand.  In the subterranean storeys of the castle, the thunder was nothing but a faint, distant vibration, felt more than heard.  His fire burned merrily despite the steady drip of rain down his chimney, warming his legs as he extended them across the thick carpet.  His Christmas gift to himself was a night of uninterrupted pleasure reading, and he may have-- just possibly-- sighed in reilef as he wormed low on the cushion, rested his book against the crook of his knee.

He poured out the last of the wine, unwilling to waste it though it was not to his taste.  He took a lingering sip, rolling the mild floral bouquet across his tongue.  No, too much tannin for him, but it reminded him of the perfume Bichette had worn to the Christmas Eve banquet, something with a note of wild cherry, and he liked it for that.  He took another swallow and turned a page.  Perhaps tomorrow he'd sequester himself away in his lab.  He hadn't brewed anything truly experimental in more than a year, but he had inklings and ideas swirling in some subliminal layer of his brain, emerging as an itch in his fingers.  Maybe have something worthy of a paper for next year's Potions Expo.  He soothed a tickle in his throat with another sip of the wine, and allowed his thoughts to turn to those rare and expensive ingredients Samuel Damocles had raided from his private stock.  His richest and most inventive period had been his final year at Hogwarts through the first year of his service in the Dark Lord's coterie of men and women dedicated to the Dark Arts.  He had largely turned away from new creation then; Dumbledore had encouraged it, and in truth his own guilt and self-loathing had robbed him of the imagination and creativity required for true inspiration.  But maybe that was changing.  Maybe it was all right for it to change.

He took a deep breath, inhaling the warm piney scent of the fire and the fruity aroma of the wine, and emptied his glass with a large swallow.  To change, he toasted silently.

 

 

**

 

 

_Severus._

A cool cloth stroked his brow.  He gasped, coming abruptly awake.  He was burning hot.  Icy water trickled down his skin, relief that was instantaneous and instantaneously gone into the fire that enveloped him.  He was far too disciplined to cry out, but it was only some vistigial instinct that ground his jaws together on the agony.  Was this the Cruciatus?  But who would curse him, what had he done?

'Severus.'  It was a man's voice, he thought, and the hands that seized his wrists had a man's strength, pinning him to sweat-soaked blankets.  'Shh,' his captor ordered him.  'Shh.  You're safe, you're alive.  You're ill, but you'll survive it.  We got it in time.'

His shattered memories lay like broken glass, piercing him no matter how he writhed.  'Albus?'

'I'm here, my boy.'  That was a voice he knew, the voice that bound every oath and vow but one.  But it came from further away than he imagined, and when he tried to pry open his gummed and aching eyes, he saw two blurry forms, and the one who held him down was not Dumbledore.

'Lupin,' Severus croaked.

'Shh.'  Lupin's palm pressed on his chest.  When Severus stilled, Lupin removed the cloth and brought it back remoistened.  He brushed away a drip that escaped down Severus' cheek, and his thumb stayed there, making a tender path back and forth on his feverish skin.

'What,' Severus breathed.  'How.'

'Poison,' Dumbledore said.  'In the wine.'

'Later,' Lupin said firmly.  'He won't remember this anyway.'

'Want-- know.'

'Later,' Lupin told him, and there was no arguing, he hadn't the strength.  The fever was swallowing him again, dragging him down into flame.  'You're almost through it.  Rest easy.'

He had no choice about it.  He would have fought, he wanted to fight, his heart hammered in his chest in a moment of towering rage, but the moment passed, and he succumbed.

 

 

**

 

 

The storm had not abated.  That was his only marker of the passage of time, the wind that rattled the foundations, the damp taste on his tongue.  He was bound to his bed, too weak to move or indeed stay awake for more than half an hour or so at any one time, but his bones knew Hogwarts, and he clung to this knowledge.  He had not been laid so low, not yet.

When he could wake, he found Lupin at his side, never more than a foot from his bed.  Sometimes Lupin was asleep in his chair, head drooping at an awkward angle, the dark circles about his eyes proclaiming weariness nearly as profound as Severus' own.  In the strange staggering peaks between troughs of hallucinatory dreams, Severus would blink and find Lupin bending over him with cups of broth or tea, both of which tasted like beeswing and repulsed him.  Only once more did he see Dumbledore, accompanied by a man Severus only half recognised in his mental fog, a fit tall man with chocolate-black skin.  They asked him questions, or he thought he talked to them, but later could not remember what they had asked or how he had answered.  He fretted at it til Lupin tucked him tight in a warm quilt and stroked his forehead, sending him to a dazed sleep.

The storm raged on, and that was the only constant thing.  It kept him from going mad.

At last, his sleep was true rest, and when he woke from it he was aware as he had not been, he now knew, for some days.  There was grey daylight all around him, and the low musical rumble of rain pounding the window-- and a window meant he was no longer in his own suite.  He blinked, and rolled his head toward it, noting as he did that there was no pain, and the drag and wash of his sloshing thoughts had gone, leaving only a sort of tranquil haze.  He was in an unfamiliar room, panelled in rich rose-coloured wallpaper, curtains of ivory lace framing, yes, a large window.  He was ensconced in a canopied bed of white-painted wrought iron, and porcelain vases of Christmas roses scented the air with a delicate floral aroma.  It was most definitely not his Hogwarts.

And the child who sat on the divan reading a book was most definitely not his.

His sudden start brought the child's eyes up.  A girl, blonde, wearing a dressing gown of white velvet over small pink satin slippers.  She favoured him with an angelic smile, and Severus stared at her, wondering, for a surreal moment, if he had died and wandered into an undeserved here-after.  As he watched, she hopped off the divan, and came to his side.  She touched his hand atop the quilt very gently, and smiled at him.

'Avez-vous besoin de plus de médicament?' she said.

Severus blinked.  'I...'

'Gigi!'

'What?'

The _crack_ of a house-elf's apparation made him jump.  A little creature with unusually large ears, even for a house-elf, appeared at the end of his bed, the top of its bald head only just visible over the footboard.  It must have stood on its toes, for it bobbed up, popping eyes peering, and it squeaked and vanished with another crack.  A moment later it was back, staggering beneath the weight of a large tray which it deposited on the bed beside Severus, and then it was gone again, all in the space of seconds.

The girl climbed onto the bed, then, using Severus' arm for leverage without so much as asking.  She settled against him, apparently quite confident in her reception.  She smelled, he noticed, like the roses.  She gathered croissant and compote on a delicate plate of bone china, and poured him a doll's sized cup of coffee with cream.  He snatched it before she could hold it to his lips, as she intended, but rather than taking offence she only tucked into place at his side.

'Would you like to help me with my book?' she asked.

Severus wet his lips with the coffee.  'Where am I?' he rasped.

'At my house,' she said, indifferent.  She had brought her book and opened it on her lap now.  It was in French, he realised, and she had spoken French to him, and he realised, then, that he knew, though how it was possible--

How it was possible was likely down to the man who stood at the door, then.  Remus Lupin.

Ah.  That answered for where he was.  And he remembered the child, now.  Delphine d'Armagnac, granddaughter of Claude d'Armagnac, Baron of 23 Rue Chevrefeuille.  Which led to another question.  How had he got from Hogwarts to France-- and why?

Lupin came to him as soon as Severus scowled a greeting, to put the back of his hand to Severus' cheek and then his forehead.  'Temperature's down,' he murmured.  'You almost didn't scorch my skin off my bones.'  He tweaked the girl by the nose.  'Keeping Professor Snape company, Delphine?'

'He's helping with my book,' she reported.  'Grand-père said to read one more chapter.'

'Grand-père isn't here,' Lupin said.  'Go play, madamoiselle.'  Lupin summoned a chair, which slid across the floor and came to an almost soundless rest on the thick rug.  He removed a phial from his pocket, and set it on the tray.

'It's been four days,' Lupin said then.  'You drank poisoned wine.  Claude invited you here to recover, and I thought it best.'

Poison.  Severus had already suspected it, gathering his own symptoms in mind.  Lost time, general wasting exhaustion, a malaise of half-memories that suggested fever dreams.  It must have been dire, to require a move from Hogwarts.  'Why am I not at Saint Mungo's?' he asked slowly.

'Claude invited you here.'

'And you thought it best.  That's no answer.'

'It's not the question you ought to be asking.'  Lupin helped himself to the coffee press.  'Do you remember the wine?'

'The wine.'  What he did remember was a shaky construct, at best.  'I remember the feast on Christmas Eve,' he began, but Lupin was already shaking his head.

'Christmas night,' he said.  'Just after eight in the evening.  It was the wine.  The Aurors will have tested it by now, but Dumbledore found it first.'

The wine.  He blanched, remembering suddenly, with a keen edge of anxiety.  Bichette had gone quiet, remote from him.  A headache, she'd said.  Her face had been pinched and pale when she'd left him Christmas morning.

'Has anyone attempted to contact her?' he demanded.  'Anouk Pelletier, she won't be at her home, she was to visit her aunt--'

'She hasn't got an aunt.  Two brothers, estranged.  Her mother's been asked to look out for her.'

'But--'  She'd told him she had no living family but that aunt.  Hadn't she?  'No, I don't believe-- you.'  Heat rose in his chest and face, he clenched his hands in the quilt covering him.  Not the right question.  Not the right question.  'How did you find me in time?' Severus demanded.

Lupin stirred a spoonful of sugar into his cup and sipped.  'Because I had been expecting this to happen, and had you under a tracer.'

In full command of his faculties it would not have taken half so long to comprehend that statement.  Severus reacted to the latter surprise with a splutter of indignation and only slowly, too slowly, reached for the buried lede.  'Expecting this?'

'I warned you,' Lupin said.  'Or I tried.  I reckon you thought I was lying; or stupid.  Only I wasn't, and I'm not, and I know you well enough not to rely on hope.  The night you came here, I put a suspended tracer on the lintel of the drawing room door, set to fall on whoever passed beneath it first.'

Lupin had that nearly aggressive self-possession in place like a mask of granite.  'I felt no tracer that night,' Severus denied him.

'I am an expert in Defence,' Lupin replied, dead-eyed.  'Or you were already so deeply ensnared that you ignored and dismissed what you didn't want to believe.'

It was devastating to be flayed so open.  Humiliation the like of which he hadn't known since the days of the Marauders burnt in his cheeks, in his chest.  And, worst of all, it was true.  It could not be other than true: it was his own fault.  A mistake he had been foolish enough to make was shame enough.  A mistake he had made twice was deadly, and deserved.

'I owe you a life-debt,' he croaked, forcing his numb tongue to speak hateful words.

But Lupin only shook his head, and there was a crack, then, in his wooden facade.  'No,' he said, almost on top of Severus, 'No.  In this act I pay my life-debt to you.  I nearly killed you, when we were children.'

It was too much.  He had a lifetime's practise in resentment, and they were neither of them Pureblood, but the words had power.  He actually felt the balance between them shift, the weight of an old magic reworking itself between them.  Or perhaps it was the dizzying whirl of his thoughts, echoes slapping against the confines of his skull like waves eddying from the maelstrom in the centre of him.  He closed his eyes.  It didn't make Lupin vanish, nor the dreadful knowledge of a debt quit, a life for a life.  His life, and those who had endangered it.

'She wouldn't have done this,' he whispered, loathing himself for the weakness.  Lupin would slap him down, and he hated that he needed to hear it aloud.  But he did.

'She had access to your rooms.  Opportunity.'

'What motive--'

'She killed her husband.'

He could hear no more, past the rushing in his ears.  He spared himself nothing of the hurt, let that reshape him, too, as with the lifting of the life-debt, reforming him like clay and baking him harder, cracks and all.  She had only ever said that her husband was gone, he hadn't even known the man was dead.  He hadn't ever asked, because he was a besotted fool.  Every step of his life's path should have led him to suspect her sudden interest in him.  She'd flattered his ego, praised his intelligence, he'd taken her silence as mystery and liked her all the more for being a blank slate he could imprint with his own desires.

'Why,' he breathed.

'Later,' Lupin said.  Severus merely shook his head, and Lupin repeated himself, only just louder than a whisper.  'Later, Severus.  Drink this.'  The phial was pressed into his palm.  Lupin held his hand, then, as the rain washed against the window glass and the silence strained between them.

Severus drank.  His Potions Master tongue picked out lavender, valerian, the bitter undertone of asphodel.  Sleeping draught.  He turned his head into the pillow and let it take him.  Fool, he cursed himself, fool.  Fool.  Fool.

It was too much to hope for that Lupin had brewed poorly and made him Draught of Living Death instead.  He would almost have preferred it.

 

 

**

 

 

Lupin's blonde charges seemed to have entirely too much time free of studying.

Or, rather, entirely too much say in where they preferred to do that studying.  Severus found himself in constant company, and the worse his mood the more cheerfully they scolded him, as if he were only a very large and unusually petulant playmate their own age.  Despite his years teaching Severus was hardly fond of children, and this enforced closeness wearied him to the bone.

It also handily distracted him from his woes, and so he never actually voiced his complaints where Lupin could hear him.  He read, in halting school-boy French, the Tales of Sabine Star-Seeker, parables of a magically gifted teen girl meant to provide lessons in early spellwork.  Delphine was a more patient guide than he was, correcting him when he faltered and taking criticism well enough when he, in turn, expounded on the theory behind some of the spells in the stories.  She was not unintelligent, though prone to rather more fancy than Severus might have preferred.  The boy Germaine was altogether too much energy, and breakables had a tendency to smash to smithereens in his presence.  Lupin, Severus was hardly surprised to see, was no disciplinarian.  Most often he'd wave a wand and vanish the mess or repair whatever had shattered most recently, and the incident would go unmentioned.  Once, one of the house elves bringing Severus his luncheon discovered the teapot in shards on the rug, and Lupin got to the mess only just before the Baron, summoned by the elf, arrived.  Severus, weakly bound to the bed, watched in dim shock as the gay little household exploded into boiling rage.

In an instant the Baron had Germaine over his knee, whipping him savagely with his wand and leaving hot red welts in his wake.  Germaine gave one startled wail and then fell to silent sobs, evidence Severus recognised from all too much personal experience.  This wasn't the first time.  Germaine had learnt not to fight back.

He had a protector now.  Severus had flung back his quilts and stood on wobbly legs.  'How dare--'

'Claude.'  Lupin caught the descending fist with an audible smack.  'Claude,' Lupin said again, and his soft tone had gone compelling, commanding.  'Stop,' Lupin said.

It was a contest of wills.  The Baron was red-faced, white-lipped.  He looked mad.  Then he blinked, and looked down at the little boy, gathered him up, tenderness incarnate.  The wand tucked away as if it had never been used in so barbaric a manner, and he pressed kisses to Germaine's flushed cheeks with a whispered apology.  Lupin's hand lay on his shoulder the entire time.

Germaine was in sniffles for nearly an hour, sitting on a pillow on Severus' bed and obliging Severus to lose dozens of rounds of gobstones.  Lupin and the Baron had gone and the house was quiet, but for the storm.

'Allez-vous rester ici?' Germaine asked him, as a crack of thunder pealed over the house, shaking it to its foundation.

'No,' Severus said.  'No, I can't stay.  I live somewhere else.'

Germaine accepted that with equanimity, but he didn't meet Severus' eyes again, and soon enough he left without another word.  Severus swept the gobstones to the rug in a petty display of temper witnessed by no-one but the house-elf, who took them with her.

Lupin came back that evening with a split lip and sat as though the chair pained him.  They stared into the fire, both of them, til some clock somewhere chimed midnight.  Lupin stirred, took him in with a glance, and said, 'Happy New Year.'

'I wonder if I wish very hard I might un-do having met you again,' Severus replied.

Lupin tilted his head back, his mouth pursed.  'Yes,' he agreed, considering and slow, and that was all.


	8. Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I love you. I love you,  
> but I’m turning to my verses  
> and my heart is closing  
> like a fist.
> 
> ~Meditations in an Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

'Eat your chicken.'

'I don't like it,' Severus said peevishly, feeling fierce satisfaction at the way Lupin's mouth went tight and pinched. When Severus tried to knock the plate over, Lupin made the face that indicated he was trying very hard not to roll his eyes. Severus had become quite familiar with that face.

'I'll still make you eat it even if it falls on the floor,' Lupin said.

'No you won't. The house elves would die of shame. You wouldn't kill an innocent house elf.'

Lupin sighed, and set aside the fork with a large bite of uneaten chicken on it. 'All right. This isn't working. I'm willing to try bribery. What do you want?'

Stated so baldly like that, Severus thought it must be a trick. Lupin met his eyes calmly, perhaps a tactic to indicate he'd accept verification by Legilimency, though he might also be perfectly aware that Severus was too feeble yet to control a magical expenditure of that magnitude. Severus glowered. So it was a trick, then. 'How do I know you'll honour any agreements?'

'Because I'm a grown-up,' Lupin replied gravely.

'Oh, very ha-ha.'

'Severus, you are tying my last nerves in knots, I swear. What do you want?'

'I want an owl.'

'Fine.'

'And parchment. And a quill.'

'I assumed that was the point of the owl.'

'I want you to swear you won't read my post.'

Lupin didn't have an immediate riposte to that demand. 'I should like not to have to,' he said at length.

'What do you think I'll write?' Severus challenged him.

'I don't know. I think it could go one of two ways. Revenge. You'll write everything you know to the Aurors, who are already looking for her, and they'll write back asking you to return to British soil for an interview, and probably use that as an opportunity to ask you questions you'll find very embarrassing and intrusive and possibly also offen-- never mind, you'll absolutely find them offencive, and likely that'll be the point of their asking, so that'll be a mutual treat. Or you'll completely fall apart and write to the woman, and regret it for the rest of your life.'

'I hate you.'

'I know, dear. Now. Eat your chicken.'

Severus ate it just to shut Lupin up. It was good. He hated that, too. He chewed exactly thirty times as his mother had insisted made for optimal health and digestive ease, and because it delayed Lupin from forcing another bite on him. Lupin waited him out patiently, and even put the fork down, and then as soon as Severus thought he was safe Lupin hit him with the goblet of milk.

'You're enjoying this,' Severus pouted, when he had swallowed obediently.

'I'm ecstatic.  I thought my life would never be complete, but here it's reached its zenith, playing your bednurse.'

He knew, in some detached part of his brain, that he was behaving like a child.  He'd been confined to his bed, the Baron's bed in this upper storey room of 23 Rue Chevrefeuille, for nearly a week, in addition to whatever time he'd spent in it mad with poison.  Poison that had scattered his thoughts like dust on the four winds, left him with fine trembling in his hands, his carefully hoarded and groomed emotions bursting wildly out of the bounds of a lifetime in an unforgiveably petty display.  He loathed this confinement, loathed that Lupin could be said-- by someone inclined to be more gracious than Severus-- to be owed more.  He knew in some small way he was neither thinking nor feeling with his entire faculties.  That small bit of him cringed.  The rest of him went full steam ahead.

'I have questions,' he said, when Lupin had dabbed the napkin to each corner of his mouth.

'I'm sure,' Lupin replied.

'You probably have a ready answer to each one.'

'Oh, I hope not.  We're having such fun playing games, aren't we.'  Lupin returned the meal to its tray and covered it with the napkin.  'I'll fetch your things, then.  Perhaps you might clean up a bit.  If you're very good, I'll take you to the garden.'  He acknowledged Severus' elegant sneer with a solemn incline of his head.

A house elf answered his summons when Lupin had left to retrieve writing supplies.  In short order he had a half-bath prepared, steaming gently in the chill of the porcelain commode.  He shaved, though his hands shook and he didn't trust the razor to the delicate skin of his upper lip.  The effort of his wash was exhausting, and he clung with wild resentment to the cane that appeared pointedly in the corner when he emerged to drag himself back to-- no.  He would not sit abed all day like an invalid.  He was upright and would remain so.  He chose the stuffed settee a respectable distance from the fire and called one of the damnable house elves back for a thick blanket and house slippers.  It brought woollen stockings as well, and a horsehair pillow with a large crest of some sort stitched into the front-facing pane.  Severus stuffed it behind his back and sat with his hands crossed on the gold bauble atop the cane, muttering to himself about Lupin's execrable tardiness as he waited.

Lupin was probably no more than twenty minutes, but it was time enough for Severus to drift into an unintended nap.  A gentle hand on his shoulder awoke him.  Severus blinked blearily, and Lupin smiled as he brushed a thumb over the whiskers on his chin.

'Rakish,' Lupin commented, and laid a small writing tray over his lap.

It was quiet, then, for a time, even peaceful, as Severus dipped his silver quill into the pot of ink and scratched out salutations, crossed them through, tried again, and abandoned the sheet for another.  His trembling fingers made fine script impossible.  He steeled himself against frustration and instead honed his verbiage to expert concision.  _Albus_ , he wrote, turning a lingering tail on the ess into an emphatic underline.  _I am recovering and wish to speak to you with all rapidity.  No doubt there are legal implications to my disappearance, no mention of my spring courses.  Please send me the rota and lesson plans and--_

And.  That was the crux of it.  Severus glanced up from his labours to Lupin, who sat at the window, one pane cracked to whisk away the smoke of his cigarette.  There was a yellowish stain on Lupin's lower lip.  It matched the thumb-sized bruise just above his collar.  There were fresh marks of teeth in his wrist, new from this very morning.

Severus crossed through the line _I have every expectation of leaving this place the moment I am well enough._   He replaced it with _Circumstances may require my presence here a while longer._  

'Where are the children?' he asked Lupin, appending his name to the sheet and shaking sand over the wet ink.

'Their mother is in residence.'

'You've never mentioned the parents before.'

'They're about.  They have another home, in the countryside.  I believe they prefer the solitude.'

'They work?'

'Perish the thought.  Charles has nominal officership in some trading company.  Timber, I think.  Maelys sits on the Board of Governors at Beauxbatons.'

That reminded him of Lucius.  The Hogwarts Board of Governors would surely be aware of his absence by now, especially if Aurors had been involved.  He began a fresh letter with Malfoy's name.  'And Claude?'

'A lengthy career bribing and influencing the French Ministry.  He fell out of favour perhaps five years ago.  Certain of his activities came to light.  He had the choice between public scandal and early retirement.'  Lupin ground out the stub of his cigarette against the window sill and dropped it outside.  'Retreat may not be valourous, but it is far more comfortable than Bagne de Cayenne.'

Devil's Island.  It had a reputation for brutal conditions, though the wardens were ordinary wizards, not Dementors as at Azkaban.  The French worked hard to keep up with their literary reputation for harsh penal policies.  'What did he do that was so scandalous?'

'He was a _mangeur de mort_.'

Severus had grown used to the way everyone here dipped in and out of French; sometimes he understood and sometimes context was sufficient to convey meaning.  He knew _mort_ , of course, Latin root, but it only slowly crept over him, a shiver of recognition, an instinct of repulsion.  Knowing.

Death Eater.

'I wondered if you knew,' Lupin said, into his silence.  'Voldemort had supporters in France.'  Lupin shut the window and rose instead to stoke the fire, thrusting a poker at the cedar logs and raising a cloud of sparks with a word of magic.  'I was sent to Beauxbatons to keep an eye on likely families.  The Order no longer trusted me, I knew that; I'd crossed some line or said the wrong thing and my loyalties were called into question.  They sent me out of country where I couldn't harm anything.  That I was useful here was really beside the point, and in the end, thanks to Harry Potter, it didn't come to much.  France was the first outpost, you know.  In the '40s and '50s, before he ventured out for more exotic dark practisioners, and again in the '70s, just before he returned to Britain.  There's hardly a Pureblood family in France without some connexion to him, or at least dealings with his facilitators.  It took him less than a generation to turn Beauxbatons into a breeding ground of exactly the kind of wizards and witches who would support the first declared Dark Lord since the Empire.  Which made it all the more curious to me, how strange it was that Voldemort focussed all his energy in Britain.  Because I very much believe that if he'd wanted the Continent, it would have been his for the plucking.  France was awash with his supporters.  They argued openly in the ministère for ejecting mixed-bloods from all major positions, and they're exiled from good society by general consensus.  Claude had a sister.  Ran off with a Muggle.  He killed her.  He and his comrades burnt her alive with fiendfyre, her and her husband and their infant son.'

That was not a unique story.  Severus knew a dozen just like it.  And how many Death Eaters in Britain, just like the Baron d'Armagnac, lived openly now, secured by their money and their breeding and their connections?  'But the Dark Lord wanted Britain,' Severus said.  'England made him what he was, and he wanted to reduce it to ashes in vengeance.'

'For him,' Lupin agreed.  'For his followers, I think many of them are quite happy with how it all turned out.  They thinned the herd of the most objectionable members, and now it's ever so civilised, these days.  They have their Pureblood utopia, and no maniac dictator to bow to.'

'That's how you found a position here?  You knew of them through your observations at Beauxbatons?'

Lupin put a shoulder to the mantel, arms crossed over his lean chest.  'Does that answer your questions?'

Not by half.  'Why?' Severus whispered.

'I should think it's evident.  Why else should I place myself here?  There are Light families left in France, of course, though they subscribe to the same obnoxious ideals, if you want to call them that.  I'm a half-blood, a cursed wizard.  I could hide it, but not for long.  They might take me on out of pity, but that never lasts long, either.  They might take me on to make an example of me, as Dumbledore did.  A tame werewolf who wears the leash willingly for scraps from the head table.'

He said it without bitterness.  That made it all the more haunting.  'You're going to kill the Baron.'

'Obviously,' Lupin shrugged.

How he made the leap, he wasn't quite sure.  It was not that the information was overwhelming, and the habit of a spy was to take in every clue, what was said and what was not said, the littlest twitch of an eyebrow, the slightest shift of attitude that might indicate duplicity or truth.  Lupin spoke nothing but the truth, and maybe always had, but that honesty was far more disarming than a lie could have been.  Severus stared down Lupin's imperturbable self-possession and read the broken man beneath it.  Lupin was right.  Pity did not last long.

'How did you know to warn me against Bichette?' Severus asked slowly.

Lupin didn't blink.  Nearly, anyway.  His eyelashes shivered just slightly.

'How did you know?' Severus hissed, shoving the lap desk to the floor.  The ink splashed and spilled on the fine woven carpet, and a house elf appeared with a shriek of dismay, launching at it with conjured soap and water.  Lupin glanced down at it with furrowed brows, and sighed.

'Leave it,' he told Severus.  'You're overwrought.  I shouldn't have burdened you with this.'

'What happened to the--'  But he knew.  The chaotic swirl of clues that had seemed meaningless without connectors began to resolve into a new kind of madness, ordered and complete and very deadly.  'What was the poison in the wine?'

'Severus.'

He freed his wand from his sleeve, levelling it.  ' _Expelliarmus._ '  Lupin's wand blasted into the air, tumbling end over end til it landed with a smack in Severus' palm.  The house elf gave another dramatic gasp of fear, and vanished with her scrub brush still sawing at the carpet behind her.  'The truth,' Severus dared him softly.  'The truth, or I will attack you here, and none will gainsay me it wasn't deserved.'

Lupin reacted very nearly honestly, before the shutters went down in his eyes again.  Watching hawklike for it, Severus saw it as never before, the way Lupin almost painted himself into a picture of composure, facial muscles in slack neutral, arms coming to a graceful rest, feet flat to the floor.  Oh, yes.  Saw it as never before, how unnatural it was, to have that as a near instant habit when threatened.  A Gryffindor's version of Occlumency-- shields with the cracks custom-built, armour with weak joints at every turn.  'The truth is complicated,' he said.

'Best get explaining, then.  What was the poison?'

'You've already guessed.'

'I want it confirmed.'

A breath passed.  He thought Lupin would try him, and it was on his lips, a curse of appropriate severity to convince him otherwise.  But Lupin nodded, once, and answered.  'Wolfsbane.'

'And you knew she would try it.'

'I thought it exceedingly likely.'

'Why?  How?'

'Because I gave it to her.  Or I arranged for her to have it, at least.  And when I saw her with you, I knew it could not be coincidence.'

He was already steeled to it.  'Because she is a werewolf,' he rasped.  Her headache and her weakness, Christmas Eve.  And Lupin had warned him.  Not that night in the drawing room when he'd dropped a tracer spell on Severus, but the day of Damocles' lecture at the Expo.  There are werewolves here, he'd said.  He'd let Severus draw his own conclusions, wrong conclusions, but he'd been warned.

'Because she is a werewolf,' Lupin echoed faintly.  'And because you're a Death Eater.'

Their confrontation died before it could become a battle.  It was on his lips, oh, it was on the tip of his tongue, a hex, a curse, he wanted Lupin bleeding on the carpet for that.  But instead the bedroom door opened, it was as anticlimatic as that, and the Baron himself stood framed by the jamb, his sepuchral black eyes spearing them one after the other.

'Professeur,' he said to Lupin, beckoning with a precise little gesture that demanded obedience.  'It's time for your lessons.'

Lupin crossed the room slowly.  He stopped only momentarily at Severus' side, to retrieve his wand; Severus gave it up without deigning to look at him.  Their fingers brushed.  Lupin paused longer before the Baron, for some communication of eyes and mute promises.  Then Lupin left, and Severus walked proudly to his settee, sat as though he hadn't a care in the world, and resumed his letter to Lucius with the restored desk across his thighs.

The Baron said, 'You will leave tonight.'

'Agreed,' Severus replied, and wrote as much to Lucius.  He inked the letters very precisely, the nib of the quill indenting the paper with the weight of his marks.  'I have no desire to share your werewolf whore, my lord.  You're most welcome to him.'

The Baron's face suffused with red like a flash burn.  Severus continued writing as if he didn't notice, though he gripped his wand beneath the lip of the desk and tensed in anticipation.  He did, he realised in grim fascination, want to fight.  For the first time in a very long time, maybe the first time since his first official outing as a Death Eater.  He smelled smoke, in memory at least, tasted bitter acid on his tongue.

But the Baron didn't pick up his challenge.  He only smiled, coldly, and withdrew.  Severus slowly relaxed his clenched fist, letting his wand rest on his knee.  When a house elf arrived to pack his bags, Severus made no protest, and didn't spare the time to leave Lupin a note.

 

 

**

 

 

His journey home to Scotland was arduous, for all it only involved a few teetering steps through fireplaces.  He exited Paris through a kitchen hearth, not fully reckoning the scope of petty revenge headed for him.  He emerged not in Hogwarts, as expected and requested, but in The Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade, and the hookup broke off so abruptly he lost the hem of his robe and a chunk of his shoe heel in the swift cut of magic.  He stood scowling, clutching his bags, in an ashy pit, pretending to himself he wasn't overwhelmed by so simple a prank.  In truth, it wasn't til Rosmerta, on recognising him, hurried to set him in a booth nearby with a hot toddy that he could face the next hurdle.  It was as well he hadn't duelled either Lupin or his Baron in France, for he could barely conjure a patronus with a message.  As it was, he had to wait on an ordinary note by owl post, and all told it was well after an hour of his unexpected arrival that Hagrid arrived with one of the school carriages to fetch him.  Severus stood steaming in the snow as Rosmerta convinced Hagrid he really oughtn't come in for a pint or six, seeing as the poor professor was done in, though they still waited in the cold as she bottled cider for Minerva and a dram of something special and unnamed for Albus and a growler of whiskey for Hagrid, and Severus was near to weeping with exhaustion by the time a wicker basket of cold pork pie and stewed apples landed in his own lap alongside a bowl of Rosmerta's own chicken soup, remedy, she claimed, as good as anything he could brew in his laboratory for whatever it was had him so pale and weak.

He dozed on the ride to the castle, and found himself disorientated when the carriage jolted to a stop.  Hagrid had the foresight-- when reminded of his task-- to draw the carriage into the inner courtyard, depositing Severus at the main doors, rather than forcing him to foot it from the stables.  Hagrid lumbered up the stairs behind him with most of the baggage, leaving Severus puffing his way up what seemed a thousand more steps than usual, all of them slippery with slush and deathly uneven.  When he staggered through the doors, however, it was right into the embrace of Madame Pomfrey, who promptly wrapped him in a magically warmed quilt and forced a Pepper Up into him right there with the open doors gusting in damp snowflakes.  When his ears steamed, she proclaimed him likely to survive the trip to his quarters, though she wouldn't put money on odds.

'Nonsense,' Severus said, with all his tattered dignity.  'I prefer to return immediately to work.  I should be just in time for the evening staff meeting.'

'Oh, my dear, that's hardly necessary, look at you--'

Severus had much rather she didn't.  Nor, for that matter, the students who were loitering in the hall, patently listening in for gossip.  His disappearance over the holidays would not have gained much notice, but his absence in the new term would have been.  Admittedly he was not at his best, which surely accounted for the grave mistake he made when, irritable at her molly-coddling, he imperiously told her, 'Out of my way, woman.'

Poppy Pomfrey had a most formidable glare.

'Please,' Severus added, because he was occasionally foolish, but never unintelligent.

'Hmmph,' Poppy said, and moved.  Exactly one inch.  Severus slid around her with his wicker basket clacking against the folds of his quilt.

His colleagues were all happy to see him, or some reasonable facsimile of emotion.  Sybil Trelawney was all melodrama and hullabaloo, congratulating herself on predicting his return to health with one breath and forewarning of his doom in the next.  Minerva gave him a hug that lasted far too long for his comfort, and Flitwick pumped his hand enthusiastically as an excuse to get at Rosmerta's basket of goodies.  There were several treats in there that made their way around the table, the last of the candied nuts from New Years and a packet of ice mice and several cinnamon caramels.  Severus was shaky by the time Albus took his elbow and guided him to a seat-- not his usual chair with the upright back of carved wood, but the saggy leather sofa with cushions deep enough to swallow a man, which was, incidentally, how Binns had bought his fate.  Severus fought his way upright by sheer dint of will.  Charity Burbage brought him an ottoman for his feet, however, and that was enough to lay him low.  He tried to stay awake, truly, but the heat of the fire, the comfort of the cushions, the general lack of Remus Lupin and his conspiracies, and a certain unfortunate giddy satisfaction at having been missed all combined to drop him over the ledge into the darkness.

He awoke, again with some disorientation, at the sound of his name.  Minerva, gently shaking him by the wrist.  'Severus, dear,' she repeated.  'I think this is quite enough evidence you're not ready to resume classes.'

'I can do it,' he said groggily.

'Well, maybe you can,' she agreed, rising and folding her arms beneath her bosom with a narrow look down her long nose at him.  'But maybe I'm not of a mind to try you.  Albus, another week, at least.'

'I only need a little--'

'I should have you in hospital, young man.'  Minerva arched a brow at his scowl.  'Oh, yes, Severus.  I would.  Don't tempt me.'

'You gave us quite a scare,' Albus contributed, in the tone he used when he pretended to mediate but really only intended to get himself to dinner as soon as possible.  Severus was more than passing familiar with it, and judging by Minerva's eyeroll she caught it too.  'And you were quite ill, my boy.  Truly, I think you ought to take the time.'

'We can cover your lower years,' Sinistra offered him.  'Your OWLs and NEWTs could spend the time in revision.'

'I sincerely doubt they'd spend free time in their books.  I'll assign an essay.'

'There,' Albus said brightly.  'And that's one more solved.  Did I hear the elves are preparing lamb tonight?'

There was no further business, Severus having slept through everything of import, and soon his colleagues were on their way out, chatting amongst themselves.  Severus made an effort to get out of the couch, which clung to him like a leathery lake squid, frustrating his every squirming attempt.  Breathless and a little dizzy, he gave it up to find Albus watching him from across the room.

Albus cleared the table of lesson plans with a wave of one gnarled finger.  Parchment flew, some tacking itself to the corkboard and some returning to the desks along the walls, arranged by instructor.  Albus was old enough to make convenience of his magic, sparing himself the physical exertion of common tasks, but it brought Severus an obscure kind of comfort to witness it.  Not many wizards of his power would stoop to householding charms and minor magics.  The domestic displays were part of what made Albus Dumbledore a man of the people, not a man above them, as Voldemort had always styled himself.  That Dumbledore enjoyed his domesticity was all part of his sincerity of purpose, his joy in small delights.  Voldemort had never known joy, even in trivialities.

'Tell me truly,' Albus said now.  'How are you feeling?  I didn't expect you back another week at least.'

'I am quite recovered,' Severus said waspishly, and against all evidence.  His throat was very sore.  He looked about him for the tea he was sure he'd had at some point.  He dropped his head to the couchback.

'I thought you would be a while longer in Paris.'

'No.'

'Remus was quite--'  Albus didn't finish that sentence, though Severus could well imagine.

The couch creaked. Severus wrapped both hands on the cool armrests.  'He came to Britain, didn't he.  He was here.'

Albus' wild eyebrows journeyed upward ever so slightly, creating a new furrow on his brow.  'He did.  He was at your side for the worst of it, most adamantly.'

'Oh, was he.'

'It was an admirable show of loyalty.'

Severus could not help his sneer, nor did he particularly trouble to.  'You've always been ever so fond of the Marauders, haven't you.  Even their pale shadow Remus Lupin.  Even making him Prefect despite his utter inability to control those terrors he called friends.'

'Are you still upset by that?'  Albus affected amazement.  'My dear boy--'

'I am neither a boy nor one so stupid I can be distracted by such paltry effort.'  Severus lurched upright and made his feet in one straining leap.  With the aid of a chairback or two in his path, he made it from the staff table to the window seat, sprawling before his legs could wobble too much.  It was all white and black, outdoors, white snow overlaying everything on the ground, the sky dark black with night, studded with the diamond stars.  He might have thought it peaceful, if he could be peaceful inside.  He was anything but, and the pallid stillness only agitated him.  'He told me once he would never return to Britain.'

Albus had remained behind, and watched him from the table.  He seemed to accept the seriousness of the question, or at least of the question behind the statement.  He didn't attempt to dissemble or deflect.  'He didn't communicate his reasons.  I will admit I was surprised to see him.  I take it he's revealed the source of our current discord.'

At least the cool window panes at his back soothed his queasy feeling of fever.  Absent the tender care of 23 Rue Chevrefeuille he was weaker than he'd realised.  'You took his memories.'

'I did,' Albus agreed heavily.

'Why?'

'If he's revealed that much, did he tell you--'

'That he wanted to die.  Why stop him?'

'Life is precious.  We had lost so many, and I did not want to lose him as well.  And I believed he would want to live, if he were in his right mind.'

'You saved him,' Severus said.

Albus at last broke their gaze.  'I tried.'

'But why, Albus.'

'I don't understand what you want from me, Severus.'

'No?'  Severus dared him with his eyes, but Albus wouldn't look.  'Why did you try to save him, and not me?'

'Oh, Severus.' Albus passed a hand wearily over his face. 'My boy.'

He turned his head away. Swallowed with some difficulty. 'When I came to you. When I came to you that night, after... after her... you told me to live with my grief. That my grief would make me a better man, a stronger man. Why spare him and not-- and not me?' he finished raggedly. 'You love him that much more?'

'Differently,' Albus murmured, somewhere to his left. 'Differently, not more, Severus.'

He didn't believe that. He didn't, couldn't, believe that. It was bitter in his gut, horrible certainty.  'Did he tell you what he's doing?  Do you know what he's up to, in Paris?  With whom he's consorting?'

'No.  He spoke as little as possible.'

No doubt.  And no doubting that Albus had asked-- oh, no doubting.  'What did he agree to?  You let him take me on the flimsiest of pretext.  Why?'

He wondered if Albus would deny it.  The old man had sincerity, but sincerity was the most effortlessly achievable quality for a man like Dumbledore.  It only required belief in oneself, and that he had in abundance.

Into the quiet, Albus said merely, 'He promised to come when I call.'

'Then he gave you nothing you did not already have.'

'Yes.  But now he knows that, too.'

'No wonder that you love him,' Severus breathed.  'You're cut from the same cloth.'

'And you are not?'  Albus rose, gathering his dark midnight robes about him with age-spotted hands. He framed those hands to Severus' cheeks. Severus would not look at him, but he let himself be turned, closed his eyes to the press of dry lips and soft beard to his temple.  'Loss,' he said, 'that's what unites us.  What binds in purpose and in character.  In that, yes, we are the same, we three.  I understand you because I was once your age, Severus, though it was very long ago, I admit.  Perhaps I push so hard because I can no longer remember how hard it is.  But I know, because I have been you, that you will survive it and be stronger for it.

'Fire burns,' Albus told him, his voice rumbling deep in his chest.  'But it also tempers.  You are stronger, are you not?  You are one of the strongest men I know.  And we will need your strength in the hard times to come.  Be proud of what you have become.  I am.'

'Please don't,' Severus whispered.

'You were brave enough to ask for this reassurance.  Be brave enough to believe it.'  Dumbledore let him be, though, stepping away.  Severus could not quite unclench til he could no longer feel the warmth of those hands, and he could not bear to look up, ashamed at his weakness.  Dumbledore offered no further challenges.  He left without a word, but he left the door open, in expectation that Severus would see himself home in good order.

 

 

**

 

 

He wrote another set of letters, that night, alone in the dark with only a candle for company.

To Lucius Malfoy: _Everything you can learn about the Baron d'Armagnac of Paris, France.  Everything you can tell me about the activities of certain people with whom we might have common business.  I cannot share the why, not as yet, but believe me that it may be of deadly importance._

To Remus Lupin: _I want information.  You have three days.  Fail me, and I will expose you.  You will meet me in Diagon Alley.  Stand outside, whatever the weather, and do not expect to see me unless I can see you.  Come alone._

To Anouk Pelletier: _I am alive.  You did not succeed.  I will hunt you, and I will find you._

He sent a house elf to the Owlery with two of the letters.  He burnt the third in the candleflame, holding the parchment pinched between two fingers til he could feel the scorch on his skin.  He let it fall in flakes of ash and smeared his desk with its remains.


	9. Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And she'd toss her head with the pain  
> and paw the air and champ the bit, as if I were Endymion  
> and she, moon-like, hated to love me.
> 
> ~Meditations in an Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

A hooded figure stood just shy of midway between Madam Malkin's and Fortescue's ice cream shop, itself a spot just shy of midway in Diagon Alley. The figure was not remarkable, in a place so crowded, and even the fact that it did not move, despite the late hour, was not so remarkable either. Even the few who bumped into the figure likely forgot they'd even exchanged polite apologies.

Severus watched from the comfort of an upper window in Flourish and Blott's, where he had secured a seat in a saggy chair near the fire. Professors customarily enjoyed exalted treatment in the bookshop; after all, they supplied the most regular customers, requiring new texts of students every year. Severus had been treated to a cup of very nice tea.  It was entirely pleasant, especially when it began to snow.  Severus wiggled warm toes in very cosy wool-lined boots and contemplated the meaning of suffering.

His conscience eventually got the better of him-- well, and he began to think Lupin would give it up and leave, no matter instructions to the contrary.  Severus descended at sunset, as the lamps lining the alleyway lit in a wave of magic, bringing warm glow like fireflies in jars dancing amid the snow flurries.  Lupin had shown on the day Severus had required of him, standing more or less where Severus had written, and it was time to do something about that.  One decision would gain him information and the other would mean walking away from it, and to the very moment Severus stepped outside into the winter chill he was undecided.  He walked slowly, letting pedestrian stragglers have the mainway.  There was no good reason to pursue things with Lupin, not truly.  If he involved himself further with Lupin's vendetta against the Death Eater Baron, he opened himself to involvement with whoever was next on that list.  That there was a list, Severus had no doubt at all.  It was a bad business, and he had no part in that.  On the other hand, to walk away without learning all he could went against every grain in his gritty nature.  Lost chances were inevitably more expensive when they rolled around for a second go.

The hooded head had turned toward him by the time he neared.  Perhaps Lupin smelled him coming; Severus had never been sure if that were a myth or a truth, in werewolves.  Or perhaps it was nothing but confidence.  Lupin had come as he was bid, and knew curiosity, if nothing else, would drive Severus to show himself when his indignation passed.

Or there was a third reason.  Lupin was carrying a carpet bag.  And when Severus neared, he saw the reason for the hood.

Clue number four, Severus thought, resigned, and made his decision.

'Come inside,' he said.  'I'll buy you a hot drink.'

Lupin's pale mouth curved down.  He was shivering, but that wasn't what made Severus step across the cobblestones and take his arm to lead him.  His blacked eyes and bloodied nose were most of it.  The fact that the arm Severus took was broken and swollen was the rest of it. Lupin limped alongside him, his left leg dragging weakly. If he didn't speak, it might have been that it was painful to do so.  There were bruises shaped like fingerprints along his jawline.  He kept pace, uncomplaining, but Severus slowed to accommodate him anyway.  It was no lengthy walk to the Leaky Cauldron, but at their sluggardly rate they were a goodly quarter hour.  Severus was somewhat winded, the good of his long rest indoors undone by the exposure to what was rapidly turning into a snowstorm.  To be greeted by the cheery interior of Tom's pub was to cross between universes.  Severus sighed.

'Professor!' Tom called.  'Well aren't you a sight for sore eyes.  I heard you was ill, sir!'

How far, exactly, had that news gone?  Severus scowled, reminded of yet another reason to be cross with the man hanging from his arm.  'A room, please, Tom, if you have one available.  My associate will be staying the night.'

Tom heard enough strange requests to think nothing of that one.  If a rumour went about that the evidently ailing Professor Severus Snape was stashing mute hooded strangers in Diagon Alley, it would be bad business for Tom and Severus both.  Tom was all discretion, selecting a key from the board behind the bar and leading them to the back stairs, without ever so much as glancing at Lupin.  Severus passed a pair of galleons, enough for two nights and a meal as well, and Tom inclined his heavy torso in a short bow and left them at the door.  Severus unlocked it, the magical key unsealing the ward.  'In,' he told Lupin, and stood back to watch him pass through.  He followed with a final check of the corridor, and sealed them in again with the key.

Lupin needed his help with the coat.  The arm was broken, yes, perhaps twisted til the bone snapped.  It had punctured the skin and been set well enough, but the splint was indifferently done, and only minimal healing had been attempted.  Skelegrow should have been applied as soon as it happened, and would help less the longer it waited.  The bruising to the throat was of secondary concern; Severus confirmed the trachea had escaped uncrushed, that Lupin breathed without difficulty, though he flinched when Severus touched him there.  Severus unbuttoned Lupin's shirt and set it aside, and followed it with Lupin's belt and shoes and lastly the trousers and smallclothes beneath them, and tended the deep purple contusions that blotched Lupin's hip and ribs and back with his wand, mending muscle by magic.

'I assume the Baron's booted you,' he said coolly, as he tried, unsuccessfully, one of the scans that Madam Pomfrey performed so effortlessly in her clinic.  It was a form of Legilimency, attuned to the body rather than the mind, but all Severus could sense was the pain.  Likely a fracture, that particularly bad bruise on the hip.  'I don't suppose the beating came with severance pay?'

'No jokes,' Lupin whispered, staring at the fire, not Severus.

'You mistake me.  I expect an honest answer.  Can you pay for this month's Wolfsbane Potion?'

Lupin didn't answer that.  He winced, as Severus poked with his wand.  There was a scar on his hip, old yet raw as a newly inflicted wound.  Severus had only seen it sideways or in the dark, never in the comfort of a well-lit room with the luxury of examination.  The curse scar, the original bite.  He could have counted each tooth, marked forever in Lupin's skin.  He thought of Damocles, Damocles on stage with that naked werewolf puppeted for the morbid curiosity of the crowd, and turned away.  'Dress yourself,' he snapped, and stood stiff-backed facing the window as Lupin dragged his clothes back into place.

'What did you do to upset him so?' he wondered aloud, when he heard the sound of boots thunking, shuffling footsteps, the creak of the bed.  He angled himself to see from the corners of his eyes.  Lupin sat gingerly.

'Well,' Lupin rasped, 'he was screaming "werewolf whore" the whole of it.'

'You knew he was violent,' Severus retorted mercilessly.

'He's never been this bad.'

'Be glad he doesn't know your plans for him.  He might have ventured into Dark curses.'

'Like Cruciatus?'  Lupin fumbled his shirt buttons, and gave it up half done as Severus reset his splint.  'Why you think he waited til now for the Unforgiveables I don't know.'

Severus could, unfortunately, well imagine.  Though he had rarely been called to participate, being too lowly or too public for the risk of exposure, he knew what his dark brethren had got up to in their mansions in the witching hours.  Stories of wild perversions had graced the broadsheets of far more respectable papers than _The Daily Prophet_ , and touched only the edges of the lurid truth.

I did not expect to find sweetness in you, Bichette had told him, the night she tried to murder him.  How lucky she'd been, not to choose a more vicious target.

Tom returned shortly with a tray of two covered plates and a pitcher of his hot mulled wine.  He didn't linger and didn't venture further than the door to deliver it, though Severus was careful to block the view of the bed with his own body.  'I wonder if you could send to the apothecary for me,' Severus asked him quietly, presenting him a list dashed on the back of a scrap of parchment emblazoned with the Hogwarts crest, and following it with another pair of galleons.  'Haste would be appreciated, but not the appearance of it.  You know how such things go.'

That was sufficient hinting to cover his presence here, he thought.  Tom had only the vaguest connections to the Order, but like many who did the occasional favour for Albus Dumbledore, he took pride in it.  Tom's chest puffed a bit in self-importance, and he offered a solemn wink of acknowledgment which Severus returned with a stiff nod.

Lupin reclined against the pillows now, his knees tucked to his chest.  His puffy eyes opened, when Severus held the mug to his lips.  By luck, it was pewter, not silver, though Lupin hesitated.  He sipped cautiously, cringeing, and let Severus daub his chin when a thin drip of wine escaped his swollen mouth.  He was a less peevish and protesting patient than Severus had been only a week earlier, but it might have been exhaustion.  He said nothing when Severus seated himself on the bed and spooned the broth from Tom's beef stew into him.

'All for naught,' Severus said quietly.  'You fool.'

Lupin accepted another mouthful.  'I'm not.'

'You haven't seen a mirror, then.'

'No.  But you've seen plenty.'  Lupin reached out a finger to tap Severus' temple.  'Proof,' he said.

Severus sat back warily.  'Proof of what,' he began, trailing off as he tried to read that deathmasque expression on Lupin's battered face.

'Of whatever the inquest will choose to call it.  Assuming there is an inquest.  I imagine his children will bury the scandal as soon as they can, and Claude with it.'  Lupin coughed roughly, though Severus withheld the wine, watching clinically as Lupin smothered his fit with a fist.  'You were in that house,' Lupin whispered.  'You saw.'

'I saw a man dangled by the apron strings of a werewolf lover who manipulated him bold as brass.  It will make fine headlines.'

He was more or less prepared for Lupin to attack him for that-- but Lupin didn't.  A pinch creased his brows together, and he did not meet Severus' eyes, but he didn't react, not really.  And it stirred something ugly in Severus.  He'd said once he wanted Lupin to hurt, and that had faded over the years-- largely through the realisation that, of all his childhood tormentors, Lupin already suffered more than Severus could inflict.  That was the way of the world, he'd thought, that people like he and Lupin, the shadow-lurkers, they would never have what the James Potters of the world would have.  It was not their lot, admiration and devotion and good looks and wife, home, children made heroes through sacrifice and love; all they had was their honour, whatever cold comfort that was.  But the Lupin who'd made him think he was fighting the wrong battle was as dead as those heroes, gone in the war.  War had broken him, and Dumbledore had left him this twisted thing that was all brain and no heart and for the first time, for perhaps the first time really Severus understood Remus Lupin, because he'd seen that man looking out the mirror for too many years to remember now.

'Did you kill the Baron?' Severus wondered, fully expecting the affirmative.

Lupin twisted the stained hem of his shirt between shaking fingers, the only movement in a body otherwise entirely still, not stirring even to breathe.  'I don't know.'

'You don't know.  No poison in his cup?  That was the point of all the Wolfsbane, yes?'

'It's in the wine.  He'll drink or maybe not enough of it and I don't know, I couldn't stay to see it done, after whatever it was you said that set him off.  Delphine let me out of the attic, I--'  His thin voice dried up.

'Don't blame me for this.  You knew he was violent-- you've been tipping him toward an explosion since I met the pair of you.  You used me,' he retorted, realising even as he said it how deeply true it was.  'Building up his jealousy.  Having me there in the house, playing the attentive nursemaid--'

'That was an accident.'

Severus overlaid the thumb-sized bruise on Lupin's neck with his own fingers.  'Don't tell me it was an accident,' he whispered.  'Not when you're the centre of this web, weaving doom for whoever you like.  How many have died because you selected them?'

'I don't know,' Lupin repeated again, and opened his eyes to Severus.  This time it was an invitation to Legilimency, and this time Severus gathered his strength and he took the opportunity as he should have done from the beginning.

 _The golden-haired little girl, trembling, the key in her fist, peering through the warded attic door, Professeur?  Oh, Professeur._   No.  Further back.  _Severus pale as death in his bed at Hogwarts, thrashing madly in the sweat-soaked sheets, Dumbledore stood nearby silent as a ghost, watching with mournful eyes._   No.  The memory that glowed sickly green, green the shade of Lupin's eyes, paler than Lily's bright agate.  _Bichette, green eyes in a witch's cold face.  She stood over a freshly laid grave, the dirt still mounded high, the stone only newly raised.  It read Henri Pelletier, son, husband, father.  She looked up at him, the Lupin in the memory, and said, We can do more._   Yes.  Severus searched it out, everything that pallid nauseating green, and found it again and again.  They hadn't used Wolfsbane, not at first.  Knives in dark alleys.  Magical duels.  Curses flung with weeping desperation.  _The swooping arches of a large hall, lined with windows of stained glass depicting fantastical dreams--_ Beauxbatons, yes, rapid memories of students clamouring with their piping children's voices, overlaid with tender love that sickened and withered, _a man, a man standing with Lupin in a tall tower, overlooking the school courtyard verdant with spring, a fight, blood on the rough stones of the crenallations as Lupin grappled him for the wand, a shouted curse, one body still.  Lupin retched, collapsing to the side, dragged himself away from the corpse of the man he'd killed.  There on the left arm, fading to grey as the magic sustaining it died, the Dark Mark._

Severus slid out of Lupin's mind and back into his own.  The effort left him feeling hollow, stretched to breaking.  He sipped at the wine, though the taste of it haunted him.  'You found them, the werewolves.'

'On its own, the curse would never be that widespread.  Werewolves don't live long enough, not often.  If it's deliberately spread--'  Lupin closed his eyes.  'With someone deliberately spreading it, there's an entire generation of us.  If there's a hundred in England, it's a thousand in France.  I found the ones I could.'

'And trained them to be murderers.'

'To kill.  That's the only use we can ever be.  Soldiers in a war.'

'Dumbledore would stop you,' Severus said.

'I was days with him whilst you were ill,' Lupin replied wearily.  'You think he didn't do what you just did?'

He didn't know if he believed that.  Didn't know if he believed what it implied.  Dumbledore was a master Legilimens, but he wouldn't have known what to look for.  Might not have known what it signified.  He didn't know if Lupin truly believed Dumbledore would bless murder even with silence.

'He would.'

Severus gave a guilty start.  Lupin gazed at him, drawn and tired.  'He would,' he repeated.  'He has done.  And he will do.  That's why he chose us, his werewolf and his Death Eater.  We're useful.  We're necessary.  Because we can do the things his other tools won't.  Can't.'

'Not this.  This is no necessary evil.  This is a-- this is a choice.  A vendetta against men living peacefully, harming no-one but those who put themselves in the way of harm--'

'Delphine goes to Beauxbatons next year,' Lupin said.  'She's bright and clever.  She reminds me of Lily, in a way.  But Claude doesn't want a clever witch, he wants a breeder of sons.  Her only purpose in life will be to marry the man Claude selects for her and birth children.  Your Anouk Pelletier, she was the same.  And Germaine.  Germaine, he's only four, you've seen how Claude is with him.  How old will he be when they put a mark on his arm and make him kill for them?  Will he even know it's wrong, by then?  You know this better than anyone, in Slytherin.  How they go after the children.  It's the schools, Severus, they go into the schools and they grind out everything human and unique and good, raise themselves these soulless little monsters who don't even know it could be different.  Light, Dark, they're all the same.  All they know is Pureblood and everyone else.'

The thin end of the wedge.  He'd felt a thrill, when Lucius Malfoy said those words.  The guiding hand of a generation.  Lupin was all too right.  He'd seen it, seen Hogwarts changing.  Part of it was Voldemort, yes, but he'd known even as a child that his father's Muggle blood excluded him from the status his intellect and skill should have earned him.  Even in the Order of the Phoenix there'd been more Pureblood than mixed, and Albus Dumbledore, Muggle-lover that he was, could do little to turn that tide.  The Ministry and the Board of Governors tolerated him because he was powerful and because he was old, and one of those would solve the other soon enough.

There was only one last nagging question, then, perhaps the only question he really did have about Lupin's quest to burn the earth of evil.  All the rest of it made its own demented sense, but for one fact.

'You spared me,' Severus said.  'Why?'

He needed no Legilimency to read the answer in Lupin's gaze.  There was no good reason, no logical reason.  Severus Snape was a Death Eater, and he had killed before and after he'd sworn himself to two different masters, one of the Dark and one of the Light.  He had done his evil, and he had watched unprotesting as evil was done so he could report it to others after, and Severus had condemned himself for it long before Lupin had known what he'd become.  He had all but died the night of Lily Potter's murder at the hands of a man Severus had raised as Lord, and only his body walked upright day after day, year after year, his heart long extinguished and buried.

He looked down, and found that Lupin's fingers had twined with his.  He didn't know who had moved first, only that they clung tightly enough to hurt.

'Maybe I do fall all over the first man to show me a little affection.'

'I liked that about you.'

Lupin's smile was the smallest crack in fragile porcelain, and then it was gone.  'No, you didn't,' he murmured.  'You took advantage of it.  Don't apologise.  Everyone does.'

'I wasn't planning to apologise,' he snapped.  'Remus--'

'Don't call me that.  I could learn to loathe that.'  Lupin inhaled, exhaled mechanically.  'I don't know.  I don't know it matters.  I did it, I chose to do it, it's over and I can't change it for wishing.'

'And what,' Severus said slowly, 'about the next one?'

Lupin squeezed his hand even tighter.  'I suppose we'll see,' he replied, and that was that.

 

 

**

 

 

Tom was quick with Severus' purchases from the apothecary, delivering a shapeless sack of bottles wrapped so as not to rattle and departing without any inquiry.  Lupin slept fitfully, as if he hadn't slept soundly in a very long time, but didn't truly wake when Severus tended his arm and his hip, and Severus gave only passing thought to taking advantage of that carelessness to exact bloody revenge.  He didn't.

Night was falling.  The evening sky was dark, in this small patch of London, with no electric lights to pollute the ether.  The snow blew hard, greying out the alley beyond their small window, but that only hastened the night.  Severus drew the curtain and seated himself by the fire to wait it out.

He woke there with a crick in his neck, gazing blearily at the clock for some minutes before taking the trouble to actually read it.  It was past one in the morning.  He could Apparate to Hogwarts, but it seemed a terrible waste of energy, not to mention the long cold walk back to the castle from the gates.  He could secure a room of his own, Tom would keep his thoughts about that private, if he knew what was good for the goose.

He moved from the chair to the bed.  Lupin stirred, when Severus sat uneasily on the mattress.  He didn't wake, or not for long.  Severus gave him a little shove, and he rolled to face the wall, shivering.  Severus stretched out beside him, wishing uselessly that he didn't ache, still, didn't feel a weak-headed rush when his head touched the flat pillow.  He yanked at the sheet, clawing it up to his chest.  Lupin rolled again, with an irritable huff, and put an arm over Severus' chest and rested his head on Severus' shoulder.  Severus froze.

'I won't molest you,' Lupin muttered, without opening his eyes.  'You were perfectly clear that night at the house.'

He didn't precisely regret what he'd said, and would certainly never admit to hypocrisy.  But he cupped Lupin's knobby elbow.  'We are who we were made to be.'

'No philosophy.'  Lupin coughed lightly against his shirt.  'I haven't the energy, I swear.'

'Then stop rambling and go to sleep.'

He thought Lupin did.  He was quiet a long time, his breathing even.  Severus did not quite drift off again, his hours gone strange in this time after his illness and his internal bickering keeping him awake when his body longed for rest.  He should tell Dumbledore about the werewolves.  Whether or not Dumbledore had used Legilimency on Lupin, the extent of the scheme had to be assessed.  Lupin had said nothing at all about controlling where the Wolfsbane went or even if that had been the first time he'd managed to get so much.  In fact, Lupin hadn't known that Bichette would target Severus until he'd seen them together in Bouzillé Alley, which implied he did not control how his fellows chose their victims nor how they pursued them.  While it was doubtlessly safer for all of them to have as little connection as possible, Lupin was hardly absolved if some undereducated werewolf attacked the wrong man and drew unfortunate attention to the possibility that random deaths were, in fact, associated.  The burglary of Samuel Damocles' hotel, that incident was surely to be included.  He would ask Lupin about that, if some bungler had assumed Damocles would travel with a conspiracy's measure of Wolfsbane in his luggage, or if that had been intended as murder.  Damocles had more than hinted--

'It was Dumbledore,' Severus said aloud.

Lupin replied immediately.  He'd not been asleep, after all.  'What was Dumbledore,' he murmured.

'Damocles.  He told me it was Dumbledore who gave him the idea.'

'Damocles-- the potioneer?'

'The Wolfsbane Potion.'  Lupin's cheek on his chest was a warm weight, his hair brushing softly over Severus' chin as he spoke.  'You're a good enough student in Potions.  You know it could be improved.'

'I know it can because you tried to do it.'  Lupin shifted, propped his chin on Severus' breastbone to blink sleepily at him.  He didn't maintain the awkward angle, resettling himself with a grunt against his pains.  'You've been laying here thinking about brewing all night?'

'He claims Dumbledore is the reason it's such a complex formula.  That it must be difficult to make, difficult to obtain all the ingredients, prohibitively expensive.  To control access.  To bring werewolves into the open where they can be controlled by those who have it.'

He'd half expected Lupin to launch some screed against the Headmaster.  There was no love or admiration there that could redeem what Lupin would surely take as a betrayal of his kind.  But Lupin didn't even breathe more quickly, didn't so much as twitch.

'You knew,' Severus guessed.

'The first time I had it, it was brewed in a teapot.  I knew.'

'He would have made a magnificent Slytherin.'

'I've had that thought before, as well.'

'So would you have done.'

'The Sorting Hat won't put you where you can't thrive.  I wouldn't have survived it.'  His thumb stroked a slow path across Severus' ribcage.  'I don't hate him.  I don't suppose I can hate him.  He gave me every chance I've had.  Including the chance to walk away from him.'

That was the sort of excruciating fairness that thrived in Hufflepuff, not Gryffindor.  Or perhaps a merely academic dissection of truth and falsehood, a Ravenclaw's escape from the emotional entanglement of right and wrong.  'Yes,' Severus agreed softly, and lifted his hand to Lupin's feathery hair.  No, not feathers.  Thick and soft, like fur.  He caressed Lupin's cheek, cupped his chin and tilted up.  At that angle their lips only just touched.  Lupin's eyes were open; Severus knew because his were, too.  For a moment they breathed the same breath.

'This is an untoward attachment,' Lupin whispered.

He didn't say love.  It wasn't.  It couldn't be.  That was what made it possible at all.

He rolled Lupin flat to the mattress, knocking the pillow out of their way.  He bared Lupin's chest, pushing his shirt high to kiss his way down Lupin's bruised torso, rimming each abraded wound with his tongue and lowering his head to that horrible scar at his hip.  In the dark he matched it with his teeth, licked it, lapped at it.  'Stop,' Lupin hissed, shoving at him with hands that suddenly shook, but Severus ignored him, ripping at the elastic band of his Muggle shorts and dipping his hand between Lupin's legs.  They'd never done this, he'd never even thought to attempt it, he had only the idea of how it worked, but Lupin went rigid when Severus pressed a dry finger into him, emitting a strangled sound.  Then he stilled.  He stilled, and lay still as Severus wormed his finger deeper, knuckle after knuckle.

' _Accio_ salve,' Severus said, and one of the phials from the bureau flew across the room.  Scented faintly of lavender and viscous, slick enough to lubricate, not absorb.  It was easier with it, and he managed two fingers, this time, Lupin stretched beneath him with eyes slitted near to close and his face white as the sheets of their bed.  He made another noise, when Severus curved his hand and pressed inward hard, and his limp sex came to life, flushing dark and growing tumescent.  Severus seized it as it bumped his wrist, and only then did Lupin finally fight him, really fight him, kicking and growling like an animal.  Severus forced him onto his side, onto his stomach, subdued him bodily by laying on him, and pressed his fingers back inside slicked heat.  Lupin clawed at the headboard, gasping into the mattress.

'Say yes,' Severus told him, scissoring his fingertips against the flesh his Potions Master's senses catalogued as something uniquely Lupin, tight and opening at once, heat that burnt and enticed in one, so small a violation meaning so very much to the fragile balance between them.  He said, 'Say yes.'

Lupin shook his head, more a spasm than a denial.  His neck was damp with sweat when Severus sucked at it.  But when at last he nodded, it was firm.

Severus would never have been so savage with a woman.  He'd never been with a woman like this, pain and pleasure intermixed, forcing and yielding at once.  Lupin's breath was like sobbing, but his mouth hung open, soft and begging.  His back and hips pressed tight to Severus, his nails digging sharp pains into Severus' arm, buttock, anything he could reach as they fucked.  Clinging to his hand when Severus twined their fingers.  He didn't let go.  All through it, he held on as if his sanity, his very life depended on it.  Lupin yielded to him, body opening for him, and Severus let loose a lifetime of rage and grief with every pistoning thrust, pouring it all into a man who took it and more besides.  Severus raced to his climax, groaning as the fire swept him and left him limp and shaking.  Lupin turned on him the moment Severus shifted his weight, knocked him back and swayed a moment, deciding, maybe. He only clambered over Severus, weak, kittenish, almost, in the tiny kisses he pressed to Severus cheeks, chin, collarbone. He didn't come til Severus locked a hand at his throat, and then only with a cry of soft desperation.

'Damn you,' Lupin whispered, and left the bed.  Gathered his trousers and his coat, emptying his carpet bag by overturning it on the rug and scooping up a pouch from the mess.  'Unward the door.  Let me out.'

Severus sat up slowly on his elbows.  'Where--'  He cleared the frog from his throat.  'Where are you going?'

'For a fag.  A smoke,' he clarified, waving the tobacco pouch, waving his fist and then just pressing it against the wall in a moment of horribly braced self-control.  'Why did you do that.'

'I wanted to.  You wanted to.'

'Either we are or we aren't, Snape.  You're the one who told me we aren't.'

'Remus.'

Lupin closed his eyes.  'Unward the door.'

His wand was tangled in the cuff of his shirt.  He freed it with difficulty.  He aimed, and hesitated before the swish.  'Are you leaving?'

'It would be smarter,' Lupin answered, not-answered, and his shoulders slumped.  'Ask me to stay.'

'I--'  He cleared his throat again, to give himself time.  'I'm returning to Hogwarts in the morning.  I'll... pay the room through the week.'

Lupin never looked at him.  The silence went on, seconds rolling into a minute, nearly to two.

'Unward the door,' Lupin said at last, and, the second Severus did, he was gone.


	10. Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. 
> 
> ~Meditations in an Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

'This is unusually public,' Severus said.

Most especially for Lucius Malfoy, who had chosen the venue and chosen as well the time, which was now precisely noon, flooding the Atrium with Ministry employees spending their meagre luncheon break on the small cafes that lined the outer ring. Lucius had secured them a small wrought-iron table at Boulangerie-pâtisserie, a mere hundred feet or so from the more popular Ministry Munchies, which had already collected a queue forty or fifty deep, begrudgingly holding place even when high-ranking officials scurried in late, groaning at the wait and sighing over their pocket watches. There was much tapping of impatient toes and weighing of alternatives, judging by the glares the trapped wizards cast about the courtyard, and more than a few of those glares swept right over Malfoy's gleaming blond hair and Severus Snape's sullen shadow beside him.

Lucius sipped his petit café with his small finger elegantly extended. 'Yes,' he said. 'It certainly seems to be.'

Severus had confined his order to English tea, which he made a point of drinking whenever Lucius drank his French coffee, and so they had their little war of cultures playing out beneath their little war of pleasantries, neither getting them very far, that Severus could discern. Lucius did enjoy these games, plays of manners and misdirections, and Severus thought he was on firm ground with the message not so subtly embedded in them. He had asked Lucius to plumb the mysteries of the Baron d'Armagnac, and Lucius was going to rub his nose in French allusions til he weaseled out the reason why.

Or til he triumphantly presented Severus with a platter of reasons he'd already weaseled out for himself. That was more likely. Lucius enjoyed the triumph far more than the pleasure of unravelling a mystery.

Lupin had been right, damn him. Severus regretted sending letters written in a temper.

'There are times when I regret my youth,' Lucius mused, unwittingly-- Severus was nearly definitely sure it was unwitting-- echoing Severus' thoughts. 'Relative youth, of course. When one is a student one learns the world as presented through one's teachers, bound by their perspective. A year or two on Tour would have been a pleasant revelation, I believe, though of course it was not possible for me. If my father had not died just before my graduation, I believe I would have made the full rounds through Europe. Perhaps even pursued a Mastery, as you did. I do envy your education.'

That was bollocks. Lucius envied nothing but power, and the years of study and work to achieve a certificate of obscure scholasticism no doubt looked like a waste to a man who had devoted those years instead to ruthlessly buying his way into politics, just as his father had wanted of him.

Lucius smiled coldly as a server brought a plate of steaming croissants and conserve. He didn't touch them-- they were only props, of course, so Severus didn't so much as flick a glance at them-- and the waiter, cowed, retreated quickly.

'Severus,' Lucius said thoughtfully. 'Severus, Severus. Sly Severus. You truly are a Slytherin to the fingertips, aren't you.'

'Flattery, Lucius?'

'Admiration. You were always a faithful--' Lucius let it delicately hang unfinished, that implied _servant_ , as if he had not been one himself, had not longed for that epithet hissed from their master's lips. 'But that fails to describe you in full, I believe. Faithful. Creative. Far-sighted. What do the Americans call it? A "go-getter".' He smiled again. Severus wondered it didn't break his delicate face.

'Prudent,' Severus countered coolly. 'Circumspect.'

'Oh, most certainly. Most certainly.'

Lucius may have thought himself a master at this game, but Severus had played against far more dangerous men. Even before they had sat down together Severus had retreated behind the walls of Occlumency, tucking away the wisps and hints of vulnerabilities where not even he could plunge in after them. Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort himself had failed to wrest them back to the surface. Lucius Malfoy would get exactly as far as Severus wanted him to, and think he had bested Severus because it pleased him to believe he could.

Severus gave it the full stretch of three minutes, time enough for a new crowd of late-lunchers to find themselves rebuffed by the impervious queue at Ministry Munchies. A squat woman who resembled nothing so much as a toad clad in sickly pink cashmere complained loudly about her exile to the tail of the line, and was ignored.

'The Baron died two nights ago,' Lucius said abruptly.  'He was found in his drawing room, quite cold.  The family are giving out natural causes, and perhaps that's true.  Apparently he'd had quite a bit of wine, and you know what people will say about a man who drinks himself to a coronary.'

So.  Lupin had accomplished his murder.  'Unlucky,' Severus murmured.

'I doubt he'll be missed.  The family rushed the funeral rites.  Buried him as quickly as they could-- indecent, but one expects such things of the French.'  Lucius paused, perhaps to evaluate his reaction, perhaps only for dramatic effect.  'How did you come to know the Baron?'

'A mutual acquaintance,' Severus answered with faux reluctantance.  He'd known he'd have to give that up and didn't truly hesitate, but damned himself anew for it.  One unconsidered missive in a lifetime of carefully considering his every move, and he'd be lucky to walk away without owing Lucius anything exorbitant.  He doubted Lucius would accept a rushed seduction in exchange for secrets as Lupin had.  Lucius was far more secure than a homosexual half-blood carrying a life-long curse, wouldn't hesitate to tear Lupin down in getting to Severus, who was not so secure as he had been even after the war, when Dumbledore had been able to testify privately to Severus' loyalties.  Severus was just a teacher at a school, now, and even Dumbledore's star had fallen from its greatest height in times of peace.  If he had to throw Lupin into the breach to save himself, he would have no choice but to throw as hard as he could, and hope it served as adequate distraction.

'Acquaintance?' Lucius repeated in an amused undertone.  'So Victorian.  I believe the woman was rather more than your acquaintance.'

Woman?

Double damn his luck.  Lucius had followed the clues like a bloodhound.  Severus had left himself wide open to this.

'Anouk Pelletier,' Lucius murmured.  'Not quite beautiful, is she, though I suppose she thought you were more enchanted with her mind.  A Potions Mistress; it must have seemed a magical match.  I wonder how you discovered what she'd done?  But then you are a spy, aren't you.  I wonder, was she lonely?  Did she see you coming?  Oh, do tell me what you've done with her-- missing since Christmas.  I'm absolutely afire with curiosity.  Will they ever find a body?  You are the most devious thing, old man.  Even better than pinning the Baron's murder on the tutor.  How did you find out he was a werewolf?  Oh, you'll keep your secrets, no doubt.  But you are an artist, aren't you.  An absolute delight.'

Severus had been caught flat-footed before and that was the only thing that kept him from reacting now.  Lucius had woven a dozen misconstrued assumptions into a web with Severus the vengeful spider.  Assuming Bichette's disappearance meant Severus had killed her and hidden her body-- assuming Severus had discovered Lupin was a werewolf and had put the wolfsbane into the wine himself to frame Lupin for it-- it was oddly plausible, if one presumed Severus had the motive and the desire to see it done, but it couldn't be the most natural conclusion to reach, could it?  How could one leap over the werewolf tutor to the Baron's death and not suspect--

Ah.  One could remember that Lucius Malfoy had supplied the wolfsbane, in rather considerable quantity, at Severus' request.  Severus stared at him with no expression, but his stomach turned over and his pulse thundered in his ears.

Lucius sipped his coffee.  Automatically Severus matched him, bringing his tea to his lips, only to discover it empty. That was the last straw, or so he let it appear. He let the cup clatter back into its saucer. 'To the point, Lucius,' he snapped.

That pointed chin lifted proudly. 'Severus,' Lucius said again, this time with oozing condescension. He sat back in his chair, manicured nails curling with a clink against the iron table. 'My dear man. No hostility, please. You have nothing but my greatest respect. You are, indeed, a man of vision. Here I thought these little trips of yours to Paris were the self-indulgent fancies of an unwary and unserious man.' He tapped his nose. 'Sly. Creative. Far-sighted.'

Severus made no move at all to the wand in his sleeve, but readied a shield spell that would not rely on spoken spells, would not save him the lost advantage of first offence but would draw the attention of all those Ministry employees swilling around them, would buy him time and confusion that would implicate Malfoy.

'Our lord will be pleased,' Lucius said softly. He sipped his coffee, finishing the cup, and set it aside. 'With our devotion and our ingenuity both.'

'Our,' Severus echoed flatly.

Pale eyes gleamed at him. 'And I do value our friendship, Severus. You are ever so discreet. Wolfsbane. My money to supply the weapon, your Continental targets.' Lucius smiled one more time, and even through his Occlumency shields it chilled Severus. 'How kind of you to include me in your success, dear friend.  Even our Lord's most ardent supporters never thought of dealing with the failures and traitors in European circles.  He'll be so pleased that we've looked after his interests wherever they roost.'

Severus forced his mouth to curve.  'Are we not, Lucius, our Lord's most ardent supporters?'

Lucius inclined his head, sealing that unspoken compromise.  Promise.  Threat.  Who knew?  Lucius might truly believe Severus had set out to murder French Death Eaters to secure his own position against Voldemort's inevitable return.  It was likelier he'd settled on a fiction that could be mutually beneficial-- it was Lucius' especial talent, finding loopholes to exploit.  Who knew, even, but that Lucius had adapted this fiction from a reality he knew all too personally.  Abraxas Malfoy had died of 'natural' causes, too, and left a very ambitious heir behind him.  It didn't matter what could be proved.  It only mattered what could be believed in polite society.

And triple-damn Remus Lupin.  He could eliminate a dozen Death Eaters across the Continent and Lucius would lay them all at Severus' feet, someday inconvenient.  It was a bitter way to learn a lesson.  He'd spent far too much time with Dumbledore and his chipper crew of honest gentlemen.  Trust was weakness.  Worse, trust was foolish.  He'd known better and he'd still fallen for it.  He deserved this, and was damned lucky Lucius had decided to play instead of punish.

When the waiter returned, Severus ordered an extravagent meal, and settled in glum resolution to endure Lucius' gloating.

 

 

**

 

 

The Leaky Cauldron was quiet, today.  Tom the bartender was no-where in evidence, probably resting before the evening rush.  A sleepy-eyed witch polished the silver at a back table, paying no mind to Severus once he bypassed the bar and headed for the stairs.  It was even quieter in the inn than the pub; there was no evidence that anyone at all was in residence.  The cleaner's cart was pushed to one side of the narrow corridor, which looked freshly mopped, still damp beneath Severus' soles, but the cleaner was no-where in sight.  Severus produced the key from one of the many hidden pockets inside his robe, and unlocked the door at the end of the hall.

Lupin's carpet bag had collected itself and moved to the chair beneath the window.  The drapes were indifferently drawn, a sliver of late afternoon glow forming a jagged line between the panels.  A pair of familiar boots stood at the edge of the carpet, one fallen onto its side to show the Muggle socks stuffed into the mouth.  Trousers were folded on the bureau, but the shirt had fallen, a sleeve pointed toward the en suite in a forlorn little crumple.  Severus stepped over it, placed his hand on the latch, and said, 'Lupin?', rather more a question than an announcement of his intent.

In either case, he received no answer.  He pressed his ear to the door.  The shower was running.  He knocked, and depressed the latch.  'Lupin,' he said again, rather more firmly, edging through the frame.

And then letting the door fall wide.  Lupin sat in the cubicle, drenched by the spray, his head bowed to rest on his knees, held tightly to his chest.  The sling was a soggy discarded mess, ripped apart in an abortive fit of rancour or wrath or some other emotion Severus told himself was too unknowable to guess.  The bruising was livid, even after all the spellwork Severus had done to alleviate it.

He cleared his throat, not because it was tight, but because he didn't know where to begin.  'Come out of there,' he said at last.

Lupin's shoulders tightened, then slumped.  'No.'

'You're acting like a child.  Too much time with Delphine and Germaine.'

Wrong tactic.  Lupin turned his head toward the ceramic tile, but his voice wavered.  'She was only able to let me out of the attic because he was already dead, wasn't she.'

'How did you know?'  But he'd already found it.  The note lay abandoned in the sink, the ink spreading in circles from droplets escaping the faucet.  It was unsigned, but carelessly blunt: _One more dead.  Be strong, brothers in blood and victory._

'Likely,' Severus replied with a sigh.  'Yes.  He's dead.  Don't tell me you're actually mourning a man you...'  He didn't finish.  He didn't have to.  Of course Lupin was.  'Come out of there,' he said again.

Lupin obeyed, slowly.  Awkward as a new colt, legs trembling as he lurched upright.  He shoved his hair out of his eyes, plastered back against his skull.  'Come in,' he whispered.

'I thought,' Severus began, and hesitated on the finish.

'What you think seems to change an awful lot,' Lupin said.  The en suite was too small for any manoeuvring except out the way Severus had come in, and he was rocking back on his heel to do exactly that, except that somehow his brain didn't communicate with his feet, and he went the wrong direction.  Lupin's wet hand was on his sleeve, plucking at his cuff, at the seam of his black robe.  Lupin's chest rose and fell with each breath, too quick for calm, and his face was both too strained and too glassy for expression that clear.  Severus didn't look at his eyes.

'Fuck me,' Lupin said.

'No.'

'Fuck me.'  Lupin's palms slid over his chest.  'Why not?'

'Stop this.'

'Fuck me.  Push me up against the wall and fuck me.'  He brought Severus' hand to his throat, tilted his head back to bare it.  'Hold me down.  Don't listen when I say stop.'

A shard of winter chill interrupted the flash of heat in his gut.  He let go, noticing with confusion the pressure of his thumb had left a white spot on the column of Lupin's contused neck.  He swallowed back his irritated denial, and sighed.  'Remus.'

'You only want me when I'm weak.'  It came out only barely louder than a breath.  Lupin made efficient work of Severus' belt, unbuttoned his fly, crowded him against the door, so close that mere breath was thunder, lightning.  'When I won't fight you, can't fight you.  Should I cry for you?  Fuck me.  Fuck with your fist and your prick and kiss me as if I asked for it.'

He shoved Lupin away.  'Stop this.'

'You pride yourself on that, don't you?  You make it impossible to say no and you ask to assuage that little voice in the back of your mind.  It makes it all better if I ask for it, doesn't it?  It's my fault then.  You lie with your body and you take what you want and you make me believe it's what I wanted all along.  Fuck me, put me up against that wall and make me ask for it--'

He'd completed the slap before he entirely knew he meant to do it.  Lupin quietened.  His face was turned a little away, pushed by Severus' hand.  The shower gave a sputter, the pressure failing as another spigot ran somewhere, and the steam dropped off.

'I'm tired,' Lupin said, in a strange remote way, utterly unlike the self-loathing intensity of moments before, as if he'd drained off everything human between inhale and exhale.

And then it was over, this unexpected confrontation.  Lupin went around him through the door, picking up his clothes as he passed them.  The scars on his back and flanks flexed silver as he dressed, his wet hair dripping down his shirt.  He favoured the broken arm, his swollen hand, shoved his socks into the pocket of his denims and slid his feet into the boots without lacing them.  His spine was painfully stiff when Severus laid a hand alongside it.

'Don't apologise,' Lupin said.  'You took advantage.  Everyone does.'

'Do you consider that you make it too simple?'  He hadn't meant to cut, but he could see it did.  He let his hand fall.

Lupin shrugged into his coat.  'I'm leaving,' he said.  'You can ask Tom for a refund on the room.  I'm going back to France, or-- I don't know.  Somewhere not here.'

'You can't go back to France.'  Something like a wince fluttered through him, a realisation that he had more bad news to deliver, thanks to Lucius.  'The Baron... it doesn't sound as though there will be an inquest, but it's far safer for you to disappear.'

'We have a safe place.'

'We?  Ah, your compatriots there, all your fellow conspirators?'  Severus returned to the bath for the blotchy note, checking again.  The handwriting leant to the left, jagged and ill-formed.  'Why not come back to England and restore Greyback's band of murderous rampagers?  He's still alive, you know.  Him and a dozen Death Eaters and hundred of their followers and a hundred more who lent money or whispered in the right ear or merely believed Purebloods ought to have more than Muggleborns, where would you stop once you began it?  You could have a proper reign of terror, right through the next generation, the children and grandchildren of anyone who ever followed Voldemort, isn't that why you never let yourself feel anything for Delphine and Germaine?  Oh, they're innocents now, but the day will come, you predicted it yourself--'

He stopped.  Lupin never said anything in his own defence, and he'd begun to realise that, begun to feel a kind of dawning awareness that there might be truth in his exaggerated accusations, but that suspicion and all other thought fled when he felt the tingle in the parchment he held.  He looked down, distracted, to find a new note writing itself in blurring ink, as the other faded out.

_Danger bring help NOW_

And he did recognise this handwriting.  Sloped handsomely to the right with an almost calligraphic bend to the quill that had written it.  Bichette's hand.

Lupin had come to face him in his silence.  Mute, still, Severus extended the note.  Lupin took it, read it in a glance, and went pale.

'Where are you going?'

'It doesn't matter.'  Lupin grabbed his carpet bag and from it his wand.  The parchment went into a pocket.  'If anyone comes to you looking for me, you'll be able to tell them honestly you don't know where it is I've gone.'

'Is she there?'

Lupin made the mistake of meeting his eyes.  It was only for a moment, but a moment was enough, when he was sufficiently motivated.  He took a simultaneous step forward, to grasp Lupin by the chin and hold him in place for it, and a plunge into the startled green irises that rose to his.  It was like falling into a whirlwind, one that battered him with invisible force as he searched for what he wanted, but he was stronger than Lupin's instinct for struggle and he forced himself past the swirl of confusion pain grief helplessness into the eye of the storm, and found what he wanted waiting there.  A dilapidated greenhouse, the warm sun baking broken panes, shrivelled ferns, overgrown ivy, a songbird hiding somewhere in the vines that carpeted the arches overhead--

Severus didn't wait on permission.  He pulled Lupin close within the cage of his arm, and laid his hand over Lupin's wand.  He Apparated them to the image in Lupin's mind.

It was only the work of a moment, though that moment stretched and bent and imploded and spat them out on the other side.  Lupin went to a knee with a gasp, dragging Severus down with his weight, and they squatted there in the dirt.  Severus cast a distracted gaze about him.  The greenhouse was slightly larger than he'd thought, the light dingier than in Lupin's memory, and it was bitterly cold, their breath already steaming.  But what drew his eye was not the wild neglected plantlife overgrowing tumbledown racks or the whistle of a brutal wind through the ominous ivy forming a living cave overhead.  It was the row of cauldrons set on crates, a distinctive odor emenating from the boil.  The Wolfsbane Potion.  Enough for six or seven doses.

Lupin hurtled to his feet as the _crack_ of another Apparation shattered the air.  Bodies hit the dirt, a fleshy thud amidst panicked calls.  Her voice.  Severus followed Lupin's run, though he felt strangely dazed, as if he swam underwater, as if part of him hadn't caught up from Apparating yet.  Lupin got ahead of him and went through a screen door that smacked against the wooden jamb, and there were voices, high and angry and frightened and then falling to a hush.  Severus raised a hand to push through the door, struggling as if the air were molasses, and found himself in a dim anteroom for night-blooming flowers, three close-set walls hung with orbs containing a cupfull of long-dry soil and withered seedlings.  The air was chokingly thin, or so it felt to Severus, dropping into that whirlwind again, except that it was inside him now.  Into the eye of the storm, there, and right in the centre of it was Anouk Pelletier.

She knelt over a pair of legs in the dust.  Her wand was in her hand, her hand was bloody, her cheek sprayed with red.  Her long brown hair had been shorn, hanging in tangles about her slender neck, but he knew her even from behind.  Her Muggle frock was plain, grey, resistant to close examination even if he'd had the capacity to stare after every detail, but he didn't, and all he saw was the means she'd taken to disguise herself, to hide from what she'd done to him.

 _'Finite Incantatem!'_ she was saying, over and over again, but the body beneath her barely twitched.  Lupin had the other side, his wand abandoned by his shoe as he used his bare hands to do something to the body's head.  Severus came closer, side-stepping a tipped-over stool and a bone-dry watering can.  A man, but there was something wrong with him.  Several somethings.  A gash across his chest bled sluggishly, but there was something wrong with his face, his mouth.  Lupin was trying to pry open his mouth, but it was red and the lips splitting under the pressure of intense swelling, rash and boils breaking out even as Severus watched.  The man stared with terrified eyes straight above him, unblinking even as his throat swelled, and the hoarse breaths rattling his torso grew fainter, choked off.  His jaws stayed tightly shut no matter how Lupin scratched at him, blue creeping into his skintone.  Asphyxia.  The Potions Master in Severus was all clinician, checking the purpling fingertips and the fluttering pulse in the wrist for confirmation of what he already knew.  The man was dying.

Was dead.  Lupin gave up just a moment after Severus saw it for himself.  The man went limp, and Anouk's final chant of ' _Finite_ ' worked, at last, as the curse died with its sufferer.  The locked jaws parted, just a little, a blistered and inflamed tongue pushing out a blood-slicked object from the bloated cavity of the ruined mouth.  Anouk made a sound like a moan viciously suppressed and crawled away, her woollen stockings dragging in the dirt, her slim shoulders heaving with sobs.  Lupin just sat there, looking at nothing.

Severus bent over the corpse.  He was careful, wary of touching something dangerous himself, but his guess was accurate.  It was just a coin.  A silver sickle.  He cleaned it on the edge of his kerchief, turning it one side to the other in the dim light.  Just a coin, no enchantments, no curses.  But it had killed.

The dead man's staring eyes were familiar.  He'd seen this man before, somewhere.  The grotesque distension of his lower face and throat made identification chancy, but Lupin and Anouk were all the clues he really needed.  This was the werewolf who had been the object lesson of Samuel Damocles' lecture at the Potions Expo.

'They do that, sometimes, when they catch us.'  Lupin's voice was distant, unemotional.  'Aurors.  Silver on the tongue, our natural intolerance of it.  Petrificus Totalus, to ensure we can't save ourselves.  A lot of werewolves... a lot of werewolves aren't wizards, anyways.'

Severus crouched.  Lupin didn't notice, or didn't care, perhaps, when Severus took up his abandoned wand.  Willow, rather short for a wand, perhaps only eight inches, with an unusually sharp point.  It was scored unevenly, reflecting the ragged scars on its owner's flesh.  Severus slid it into his sleeve, careful to do so out of Lupin's sight, behind him and in the shadow.  He moved as slowly as he dared, as quickly as was cautious, getting to the other one.  Holly.  Just over twelve inches, perfectly straight, not a single blemish.  He levelled it.  He said, 'Stand up.'

Anouk's head rose.  There was no reason left for her tears to move him, and so he refused to be moved.  Her face was blotchy with upset, turning up to his, her soft lips parted with shock.  Then a cloud of red suffused her cheeks.  'You,' she breathed.

'Me.'  He came just a little closer, not near enough to tempt Anouk to make a grab for her wand, but near enough that any issues using magic with an unfamiliar instrument would not disrupt his aim.  'Surprised to see me, my Doe?  Alive?'

He gave her full marks for courage.  She rose to face him, though a fine tremble took her limbs.  'Severus,' she said, with a certain admirable aplomb.  'I heard you had taken ill.'

'And who told you?' he wondered.  'I received no owls from you direct.'

'Stop it,' Lupin interrupted dully.

Anouk betrayed herself with a glance to Lupin.  Her mouth firmed.  'Severus,' she said.  'Do what you must.  I will not fight you.'

'I should like to see you try.'  He smiled coldly, not the facade a Lucius Malfoy built to shield his inner thoughts, but a true reflection of the icy satisfaction he felt.  Should have felt.  Wanted to feel.

Lupin put himself between them.  He took Anouk's wand from Severus' hand with no greater threat than the silver-burnt fingers of his left hand, and passed it behind him to Anouk with the right.  'Go,' he told her.  'I'll destroy this place, in case they had a tracer on him.  We don't know how much time we have.'

'I want to know--'

'Does it matter?' Lupin asked bluntly.  'Does it change anything?'

Severus wavered.  No, he would never waver.  'At least tell me who he was trying to murder when he died.'

'Why?'

'So I can cover for you when Lucius bloody Malfoy realises you've offed another victim with the wolfsbane he supplied me to supply you, you fools.  If Lucius knows, the British Death Eaters could know any time he chooses, or the Aurors if he's ever looking for information to trade-- there are a thousand ways to expose you.  You've left yourselves wide open to discovery, and he's not the first of your kind to pay for it, is he?  How many others have you lost?'  Severus threw Lupin's wand at him, too.  'Amateurs,' he spat.  'Play-acting at murder.  Those you prey on are far more experienced than you, and they will hunt you down with every tool at their disposal.  The Aurors will be the least of your worries.'

'Enough.'  Lupin picked up his wand from the dirt.  He pointed it through the door, and a moment later fire responded.  The flames ate the dessicated plantlife in the space of a heartbeat, and glass shattered as it was suddenly superheated.  The secondary explosion was the wolfsbane potion, but it couldn't be magically transported mid-brew and leaving it behind only linked them to it.  Smoke began to curl, held back from the screendoor by a ward Lupin raised with a short word.  'It will hold long enough for us to Apparate,' he said.  'No contact.  Not with me, not with any of the others.'

'Then there are others?' Severus pressed.  'How many of you?  Just in France, or is your reach larger than that?'

'They knew the risks.  We all agreed.'

Severus met and held Lupin's eyes.  'You really won't stop, will you?'

The green swallowed him in.  Fear, fear was the whirlwind, this time.  A lifetime of fear, fear of the wolf, fear of the pain of the wolf, fear of the spirit of it creeping in, seeping in like a poison, darkening and draining everything it touched.  A moral fear, even now, an awareness that the poison had indeed infected the host, failure writ in sickly black ink.  At the eye of that storm was impenetrable loneliness, and at the pit of the loneliness was a gaping wound where--

Where memory should have been.  Where grief should have been, yes, but also the healing that came with surviving grief, and the strength of hope that there would be love that powerful one day again.  That was what Dumbledore had destroyed, taking the memories.  What was left was far less human than a werewolf had ever been.

A muffled cough brought him out of his reverie.  The smoke from the burning greenhouse was trickling under the ward as it faded.  Lupin blinked, and so did Severus.

'No contact,' Lupin told Anouk, and with a swish of his wand he was gone.

Alone, they stared each other down.  Anouk's head was high, her chin out-thrust defiantly.  She gripped her wand anew over and over, as if nerves had led to damp palms, but she didn't train on him, not yet.  Nor he on her, fingering his wand and wondering why, exactly, he didn't.  He could feel the heat from the fire, like standing too near a hot stove.

'Your husband,' Severus said, as the structure beyond their room began to creak and groan.  'He was a Dark Wizard.'

'Yes,' she replied.

'But you must have known.  You knew what he was, what that meant.'

'I thought I knew.'  The ceiling collapsed inward, the screendoor juddering against its burning frame.  The orbs in their small enclosure were molten slag dripping down the shivering walls.  She said, 'He was little more than a boy.  Like a boy, he broke his word to someone.  They sent a werewolf to remind him of his obligations.'  Her trembling hand curved over her belly.  'I could perhaps have forgiven him what they did to me.  I could have worn it as a badge of honour.  Not my child.  I could not forgive him my child.'

'And me?'

'You are a Dark Wizard too.'  She shook her head, her hair falling about her face like a shield.  'I am sure your crimes are worthy of the death I tried to give you.'

'They are,' he said.  'And yet I live.  You may thank your leader, when you find him again.'

'My leader?'

'He saved me.'

The screendoor went up in a flash, and the ward broke.  Fire burst in, smoke roiling across the floor and billowing to the low roof.  Anouk whirled away, one regretful hand lingering on the body of the dead werewolf.  'Then good-bye,' she said.  'For now.'

'Wait.'

She looked; whatever they had been to each other, she at least looked, and waited for him to ask it.

'You were never really called Bichette, were you.  It was all part of the lie to entice me?'

'One of a hundred lies yet to be told,' she whispered.  'You will not stop us.'

He let her Apparate away, and did not try to follow.  He would not try to stop her, either.  Perhaps, on some cosmic scale, she had earned her revenge, or her vengeance was the same as justice.  He didn't know, and wouldn't guess.  But he knew one thing, and it was time to fix that one thing it was in his power to fix.

He Apparated.

 

 

**

 

 

Albus was gone from his office, which could mean he was at his manifold duties elsewhere in the wizarding world, or merely vanished to his mysterious rooms-- generations of students had tried and failed to locate them-- napping away a rainy evening.  But the office opened to Severus, as it would any of the staff.  And what Severus wanted was not hidden away, locked, or even disguised.  The cabinet which stored Dumbledore's pensieve stood in the corner where it always had, and it opened voluntarily for him, recognising one who had brought many memories to its depths over the years.

Each bottle was carefully labelled, though in a shorthand only known to its creator.  Severus had stood here often enough to have observed patterns, however, his restless mind trained by paranoia and experience to take in every detail, however small and seemingly useless.  Those with the tick in pencil in the upper left, those were for another time, a future Severus loathed for being so much as possible.  He left them.  Those with the faded purpling ink, the bottles clean of dust and smudged from decades of fingerprints, those belonged to a past that Severus knew very little about, and knew better than to be curious.  That left some two dozen, some with fresh tags, some with old yellowed slips, some fine glass bottles with fancifully blown stoppers, some plain utilitarian phials with cork plugs.  Severus sorted without touching, judging, eliminating, thinking.  He chose one, a squat little container of green glass, twisted off the top, and poured it into the pensieve.

No.  He knew from the first glimpse.  The furniture was all wrong, a mid-century calico print to wallpaper and curtains alike in a house overlooking a pleasant lake.  A woman sat on the steps before the door, her knitting gathered in her lap.  She was singing softly, her foot extended to rock the bassinette.  Her crooning elicited an answering coo from the baby.

But it had nothing to do with what he expected to find, and so he removed himself from the memory and scooped it back into its container.  His next choice was wrong, too, perhaps just recently rebottled.  It showed a short man in ancient dress, the rough fabric of his robe worn clasped at both shoulders with large gold brooches, matched in pattern by the torc about his neck, indicating great rank.  The memory had filmy edges, borrowed, perhaps, or passed down, perhaps even re-created.  But not relevant.

'Severus?'

He paused with his hand on a bottle of amber with a black stone stopper.  'Albus,' he answered courteously, and waiting no longer, pouring the contents into the pensieve.

A footstep closer.  Old joints, shuffling steps, the whisper of robes as the Headmaster came to stand beside him.  Albus didn't interfere, though he laid a ringed finger along the edge of the pensieve bowl.  He said nothing at all as Severus lowered his head, and plunged himself into--

Into Summerlea House.  He knew it well.  Once it had been the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, in simpler times, cleaner times, when the war had seemed a bit of a joke.  Or so Severus supposed.  By the time Dumbledore had formed the Order, Severus had been Marked a year, had seen and done things that would earn him the enmity of a woman like Anouk Pelletier.  He'd been a seasoned soldier, though none had known it, not even the Headmaster, til Severus found something to fear more than he hated.  Summerlea House was the last place he'd seen Lily Potter, til Halloween Night of 1981, when he'd clutched her broken body to his chest and wept.

He watched Remus Lupin drift from room to room, numb, silent as a ghost, trailed by eyes that worried, wondered.  Dumbledore, the Dumbledore of the memory, said something, and it sounded like fog, a whisper from far away, barely reaching Lupin.  Lupin tapped his fingers on the newel post at the foot of the stairs, looked up the landing, and Severus knew what he was thinking, knew because it was so painfully obvious, but perhaps Dumbledore hadn't believed, or couldn't even conceive it, a man so devoted to Light and Life.  Dumbledore turned to speak to someone else, and Lupin climbed the stairs, into shadow.

Memory.  Lupin transfigured a bedsheet to rope.  The moon was waning, beyond the window of his small bedroom.  They had brought him books, they had brought him wine, they had brought him the Draught of Dreamless Sleep, but he only pretended to use any of these.  They had taken his wand, but he was powerful enough for this, perfecting it night after night, focussing the magic through the spoon he had stolen beneath his pillow.  The rope was thin but strong, and knotted well when he twined it.

Memory.  Lupin slipped the noose over his head, drew it taut about his neck.  He climbed the railing, looking down the dark stairs.  Somewhere, a clock chimed midnight.  James and Lily Potter had been dead by midnight, it was nearer the hour Sirius Black had killed Peter Pettigrew, Peter and all those Muggles, turning over all his world in the space of sixty minutes.  But a kind of peace had come to Lupin, a kind of tranquility born of finding the rightness in this final act.  He would be with them, and the world had no need of him, no need of him at all, and even if it had, he didn't want it.  It was fit.

Memory.  Lupin let himself fall.

Memory.  The sound of reaching the end of that fall.  The twist of the rope.  The ugly gasps, the kicking feet, the creak of the rail.

Memory.  Shouting.  Crying.  A spell, that cut the rope, caught his descent, cushioned him to the ground.

Memory.  Dumbledore's white face, Dumbledore's terrible sorrow.  They tucked him back into his bed, with a newly conjured sheet, and over the sheet they bound him down, his hands, his legs, his arms.  Dumbledore cupped his cheek to make him drink, and he knew the wine was drugged.

Let me go, Lupin croaked.  Please.  Let me go.

Memory.  St Mungo's.  Polite smiling healers.  A kindly old man, Dumbledore, pretending to be a kindly old man when really he was all steel, all unrelenting steel, how did no-one else see it?  Promise me, Remus.  You must promise me.

Memory.  The ruined house in Godric's Hollow.  His soul shuddered away from it.  Even in memory it was too much, it was a break with reality, it was the only reality.  It was the only thing he could think of, waking, sleeping, walking the darklands between.  It was the only thing he was thinking of when he pried loose a sliver of jagged board from the floor in the closet where they'd locked him, naked and alone for the full moon, all he saw when he took the wood to his own flesh and rent it, in those few moments before the moonbeams took him and turned him into a beast that would smell manblood and take care of the rest.

Memory.  I'm sorry, Remus, Dumbledore whispered, bending over him with a wand.  I truly believe this is for the best.

It was still my choice, Remus answered, weary and defeated, chained to the bed this time, unresisting because there was nothing left in him, nothing left but the surety of death, withheld.

Forgive me, Dumbledore said, and did it anyway.

And all was darkness.

Severus straightened.  Albus, the Albus of the here and now, had not stopped him viewing all of it, but there was a faint frown on his wrinkled forehead, something uncertain about his faded blue eyes.  He said, 'Did you find what you were looking for?' but it wasn't the kind of question he asked when he knew the answer already, and only wanted Severus to find it for himself.

'I truly don't know,' Severus answered him, and returned the memories to the bottle.  He replaced the stopper, set the bottle back where he'd found it, and closed the cabinet, leaving all as it had been before his intrusion.  He inclined his head to his master, and added, 'Good night,' as he passed.

'Good night,' Dumbledore echoed, with just the most miniscule hint of doubt, but Severus didn't stay to enlighten him.

That night, he climbed the steps to the owlery, risking the icy stairs and his still-fragile health, to tie a letter to the leg of a hardy-looking horned owl.  The bird might have far to fly, or might not, Severus didn't know, and so he hadn't addressed the letter except for the name: Remus J Lupin, At Large.  It was no long message, and he set no timetable, made no especial demands, and could only hope it would be received, but he thought it would.  He thought Lupin would read it, when it came, and thought Lupin might, just might, make good his reply; they knew too much about each other, now, with everything between them.  So he posted his letter, and watched the owl fly off into the night on soundless wings.

_Come home._


	11. Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department...
> 
> ~Meditations in an Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

The greenhouses were chill and spare, full of brittle silence. Severus snipped belladonna with small gold scissors, curling gloved fingers carefully to avoid bruising the fragile leaves. He folded them in a slip of linen and tucked them into his basket, moved on to the hellebore, wilting ever so slightly in the shadow of rooster's feet, a spiky milkweed parasite that would reach its strength just before the spring solstice. Sprout did keep a well-organised botanical, though here and there Severus spied a few plants suffering the enthusiasm of ignorant students. Severus had more than enough exposure to the future generations to grieve for Mother England. Albus assured him it had always been thus, and that was what teachers were for.

He spent his evenings engaged in quiet, solitary pursuits. He marked the essays he'd assigned his upper years, though without the proper attention; one or two who weren't as appallingly incompetent as the rest achieved some carelessly dispensed Exceeds Expectations and Severus was forced to avoid all wandering groups of Hufflepuffs, who seemed to think a lack of colour commentary in the86ir margins meant the thawing of the notoriously icy Potions Master's heart. His Slytherins took his lack of attention as permission, and Severus was vaguely aware that Schemes were hatching in his dungeons, all of which would doubtlessly have dire consequences and sticky ends, doubtlessly when he least desired to deal with mess, but he couldn't bring himself to make a proper show of it. Worst of all, his listless mood resulted in a distinct decrease in the number of points lost by rowdy Gryffindors. None of Severus' fellow instructors were as actively partisan as he, but they didn't have to be-- their lack of support for an entire quarter of the school's population meant Slytherins had to work twice as hard for acknowledgment in every class but Potions. The House Cup would be dangerously out of reach if he didn't favour his own, but it seemed a petty thing, a tiny worthless distraction, and he was wont to be distracted elsewhere. He ate in the Great Hall only when Albus raised a fuss, preferring to read, alone, by the light of a candle or two, or perhaps in the library after hours when the students had gone off to their beds. He had discovered a window alcove with a comfortable cushion, a view over the lake, and a crystalline angle on the waxing moon.

An early spring inventory of his stores seemed oddly unbalanced, til he realised he'd collected everything he needed for a certain potion formula excepting the active ingredient. They did not grow wolfsbane at Hogwarts.

Easter break was some time in coming, for Severus as well as his rowdy students.  Some of the students would go home at the weekend-- it was a popular holiday amongst the Muggleborns and half-bloods who retained some religious leanings, but for the rest it meant trips to Hogsmeade, or lazy mornings spent abed or whatever gruesome adventures overly sugared minds could conjure.  Peeves, not coincidentally, also loved the holiday, and Argus Filtch the caretaker was heard muttering in particularly tragic tones the week running up to the break.

Severus Snape planned to spend the entirety of it barricaded into his Potions lab, a location guaranteed to be desolately lonely with students' attention on anything but their schoolwork.  He had a faint sensation of relief, and an even fainter pang of wishing-- but wishes were for other people, and so he shut himself away behind doors and shields of Occlumency both, and was the gladder for it.

It was Albus who alerted him of his visitor, and requested Severus' presence in the Headmaster's office.

Ah, he thought, strengthening those internal shields to present an utterly impassive facade.  He buttoned the cuffs and collar of his shirt, smoothed an errant crease from his robe with a muttered charm, and stepped through the Floo already prepared for a mild inquisitive 'Sir?' and perhaps a hint of surprise to see whichever Auror they'd sent.  Albus usually managed to wrangle an ally from the old Order, Alastor Moody or Kingsley Shacklebolt who knew when to push and when to concede ground.  No doubt they'd have enough of the details to warrant an arrest, but would want a show of compliance.  He had only two active potions which could not survive a stasis period, but so it was whenever he was called away.  How long would it take to satisfy them?  He supposed it depended on whether they'd seek evidence of Lupin's guilt or Lupin's innocence.  Severus was prepared to do exactly what Lupin had prepared him for: he could share what he'd witnessed at 23 Rue Chevrefeuille.  He'd seen with his own eyes that the Baron was a hard man, a man with a heavy hand to the children and Lupin both.  He would share what he'd guessed about their relationship, confirm that Lupin had escaped wounded, and from there it would be up to the Aurors.  If it was one of Dumbledore's men, Severus had skill enough at manipulating his memories to lie even to a mind reader, to trim his answers to the bare necessities even under Veritaserum.  If Lupin were unlucky, the Order of the Phoenix would not protect him, and Severus would speak a judicious amount of the truth.  Maybe all of it.  He wasn't sure yet if he would surrender his own revenge on Anouk Pelletier, but he was prepared to cede all necessary ground to protect himself. 

Severus stepped through the Floo, dusted ash from his hem and looked up with a quizzical brow, already murmuring, 'Yes, Headmaster?' and nodding to find Minerva McGonagall sharing a cup of tea with a man in the high wingback before Albus' desk, angled just enough to hide more than a pair of muddy boots.

'Thank you for joining us, Severus,' Albus replied, and summoned another chair for him.  It settled gently into place between Minerva and their guest.  'Won't you sit.'

It was the boots that gave it away.  Even if he had not had an eye for detail, he would have remembered seeing them before.  The one on the right had a poorly repaired sole, and the last time he'd noticed that it had been laying on the carpet in the Leaky Cauldron.  By the time he had an eyeline, he was schooled to the merest curl of the lip, and McGonagall took him in with a glance, saw what she expected to see, and looked no further.  Albus, perhaps, was not fooled, but then Albus always knew just enough to be dangerous.

Remus Lupin helped himself to a cube of sugar, and placed the tongs on the floating tea tray to angle toward Severus.  'Good evening, Professor,' he said.

So.  Lupin didn't look like a man who'd spent any time in either Bagne de Cayenne or Azkaban or indeed any prison.  Perhaps there would be no Aurors after all.  Had he really got away with it?  Calculated so precisely which scandal would be just enough, and got himself ahead of the law and the Baron's family both?  In fact he looked rather better than the last several times Severus had seen him.  He wore a robe which, though evidently second-hand, was a pleasant spruce green, only lightly darned here and there at weak seams, and his hair was different, a rather dull cut that shaded his eyes and framed the distant smile he turned up to McGonagall.  He looked like nothing so much as a tweedy Prefect, en route to request a library pass.

Severus began to laugh.  He contained himself after the first dusty exhale, but Lupin's smile fell away.  Then returned, smaller, a shade warmer, and just a little rueful.

'Does that work as a disguise?' Severus wondered bluntly, sinking into his chair.

'More than you'd think,' Lupin responded quietly.  'They're looking for a werewolf, not a wizard.'

'I weep for the Aurors,' Severus said.  'So readily fooled.  You should hire him on, Albus.  He could teach all sorts of useful tricks to our unsuspecting student body.'

'Really, Severus,' Minerva scolded, innocent, Severus supposed, of the source of his rancour, or perhaps presuming it went rather farther back than it did.  She had, after all, been Lupin's Head of House during the incident which had nearly sent Lupin to Azkaban for a murder only attempted, not realised.

Severus faced Albus.  'And I've been summoned why?' he demanded.

'Remus is returning to Britain.'  Albus folded his hands atop his desk, over the length of his wand.  'Passing through on his way to London.'

'On his way?  Out of his way, more like.'

'I want to know where he is,' Lupin interrupted.  He set his teacup aside on the arm of his chair, and it vanished with a small pop.  He didn't look to follow its return to the tea tray.  'Harry Potter,' he said pleasantly.

'As I was explaining,' Albus replied.  His face was an interesting study-- not for him any pretence at some other emotion.  His face with all its decades of etched sorrows and smiles was deeply lived in, deeply felt, and there was far too much there to read and interpret as he gazed at his former students.  'Harry is safe, and Harry is hidden.  In order to remain safe, he must remain hidden.'

'I've no argument with that.  But I want to see him.'

'Why?' Minerva asked, though Severus thought she seemed reluctant.

'I would have been part of his life if James and Lily had lived.'  Lupin's voice did not waver.  It hardly could have, he was so braced.  'I have things for him.  Photographs, mostly.'  He touched the old carpet bag at his left foot.  'A few letters.  Lily's old Charms book.  I want him to have things to remember them.'

'I'm sure his relatives are adequate to that task.'  Albus put out a hand, and it hovered there, elegant and uncompromising.  'I would be happy to hold those treasures in trust for Harry, when he comes to Hogwarts as a student.'

'I want to give them to him myself.'

'That is not possible, Mr Lupin.'

'A safe meeting place could be arranged.  Hogwarts, for instance.  If it will be safe enough in a few years I can't see why it isn't safe enough now.'

An inkling of a thought struck Severus, then.  The why of Lupin's elaborate game of vengeance hadn't yet taken full form in his mind, but he thought he saw the outline of it, now.  It inspired a certain-- pity.  If Lupin had thought to make the world safe one Death Eater at a time, Harry Potter would be a very long time in hiding.

'I'm sorry,' Dumbledore said, and perhaps genuinely was, but he was also genuinely refusing to budge.

Lupin saw it was hopeless.  He sat there breathing, only the clench of his fingers on the arms of the chair indicating the strength of his reaction, flexing now and then as if he would speak, but he didn't.  His eyes had settled on some indeterminate point of the Headmaster's desk.  'I could write to him,' Lupin said at last, in the tone of a man who knew defeat was coming but couldn't spare himself the blow.  'I don't have to know the address.  But you could see it's delivered.'

It was too much for Minerva.  Her eyes were bright, as she rose abruptly, mumbling an excuse.  Albus watched her go, and then his faded blue gaze transferred to Severus, evaluating.  Whose ally will you be, that gaze asked, and Severus gave it back indecision and hesitation.  Whose, indeed.

He said, very quietly, 'Come with me, Remus.'

It was an impasse, then.  But only for a moment.  Albus said nothing as Lupin stood, clutching his bag close.  The old man was still sitting there, watching them, as Severus led Lupin by a hand hovering over his rigid shoulder.  The spinning stairwell went along its slow grind, taking them down and away beyond Dumbledore's view.  They stepped out into a cool corridor of Scottish slate, the March sun glaring fitfully through a window of clouded glass.  Lupin put his forehead to the panes, his eyes nearly closed.

'If you wanted a reason to trounce off in a snit and renege on your promise to him, I suppose you have what you came for,' Severus said.

Lupin's jaw moved.  'What?'

'The promise he extracted from you, in return for taking me away from Hogwarts when I was-- ailing.  I believe he made you promise to return whenever he saw fit to beckon?'  Severus shrugged jaggedly.  'He could hardly blame you now if you declined him.'

'Severus.'

'Although he may suspect you if he stops to think about it.  You wouldn't truly have been part of the boy's life-- oh, come now, don't look at me that way.  You were already exiled to France by the time the Potters went into hiding.  Had you exchanged so much as a word with Potter in six months?  A year?'  He sneered as Lupin raised his head to glare.  'The truth is they suspected you, Lupin.  Even if you'd all survived the Dark Lord untouched, they would have been heroes of the war, showered with riches, ascending to the Wizengamot and the Ministry, living out a Pureblood fantasy of Light and Goodness--'  He paused, and delivered the final cut.  'They were too much of the Light, and you're not enough.  Who would have wanted a werewolf loitering in the edge of that lovely frame?'

'Screw you, Snape.'

He snorted.  'There you are,' he said.  'I wondered if you'd died and been replaced with a ghost.  Even Binns would've put up more of a fight in there.'

Lupin flipped about to face him.  'Why did you write to me?'

'I need a werewolf to taste all my wine for poison.'

'Severus--'

'You're here,' Severus interrupted, sharp enough that Lupin quietened, looking at him.  'Just... come.'

'You aren't going to keep on yelling at me, are you?'

'When I raise my voice, you'll know it.'  He hesitated, and shook his head.  'No questions.  I know all I care to know about what you did.'

Lupin regarded him wearily.  When he moved, Severus stood his ground, and accepted the brush of Lupin's mouth over his, fingers at the nape of his neck finding the line of his collar and tracking it.  'Are we just going to go on this way?' Lupin asked.  'When there's no-one else, falling into bad habits a few nights at a time?'

No.  They wouldn't.  Severus knew it, knew that was why Lupin had come with his new look and his bag over his shoulder and would be gone in the morning.  Where he went, Severus couldn't stop him doing anything, and didn't intend to try, either.  But that didn't mean they couldn't indulge a bad habit one last time.

Having Lupin in his quarters was a strange thing indeed.  He'd been in Lupin's attic bedroom in France, and had Anouk Pelletier here at Hogwarts, but both those things seemed very long ago and very far away.  Anouk had looked at everything and asked questions, had opened all his books to read pages within, removed the cork from several of the phials in his lab to sniff with her sensitive Potions Mistress nose-- werewolf nose, and Severus wondered anew if the myths were true, and Lupin had superior senses even in his human state, but if he had he wasn't employing them now.  He stood in the doorway as if wary of venturing further uninvited, and when he saw the bed he stopped, rocked on his heel, then plainly made his decision and sat there, precisely in the middle, the limp duvet crumpling beneath the weight of his body.  Severus took the carpet bag over Lupin's slight resistance, but only tucked it beneath the bedframe.  He nudged Lupin's boots with the toe of his shoe.  'Off,' he said.

Lupin obeyed, shucking them one after the other with a tug to the laces and going heel to toe til they fell to the rug.  'Off,' Severus said again, and Lupin manipulated the simple clasp at his throat with his thumb, so that his robe would slide off his shoulders.  The shirt, at least, was familiar, from the worn spot on the front placket to the missing button on the cuff.  Severus kept his hands to himself as Lupin sat looking up at him, chin tilted up and eyes hooded by the shadows.

'Well?'

Severus arched a brow.  'You were quite vocal the last time we saw each other.  I'm asking now, not later.'

Lupin retaliated with a shove.  Only to grasp him by the robes and pull him back, pull him down, and their lips met and this time there was nothing soft or sad in it.

 

 

 

It was getting late.  The weak sun never made it so low as the dungeons, and Severus had long been attuned to other signs of time passing.  His bones knew the progressive chill, the rise of the moon.  Lupin knew it, too, and was already awake when Severus turned to him.

They did open a bottle of wine, and another when that one vanished rapidly.  Lupin swore for its safety, and drank nearly a full glass before Severus trusted it, and even then half of it vanished drip by drip into his sheets, mopped up with a rough tongue along his bare chest, his collarbone, the hollow of his throat.  He returned the favour, the salt of Lupin's skin flavouring it so that only a shade of memory embittered it.  He spent a quarter hour in the painstaking job of licking the line of greying hair along Lupin's sternum into a feathery point down his sloping belly, and twice that time with the satiny folds of the organ that rose up to meet his downward journey.  His lovers would always be few in number; Severus had no illusions about himself, not after Anouk Pelletier had played him so readily.  Resentment and acrimony, jealousy, his natural sourness would all keep him out of beds he couldn't trust, and how could he trust?  He couldn't trust even Lupin, except in this.  This, he thought, was the most honest thing he'd ever done.  They were both lying to each other, but they knew the lies for what they were, and it wasn't personal.  It was almost-- comfortable.

Lupin traded him for favours, his head resting on Severus' hip and and his hair growing wild beneath Severus' plucking fingers as he explored with lazy kisses.  Severus still had his doubts whether that mongrel Sirius Black had ever been on the receiving end of Lupin's practised tongue, but even that old malignancy was beyond them, right now.  The moment of his climax was almost a choice, almost a gift to give Lupin, and Lupin even smiled at him, looking not unlike the boy he'd been when they'd both been rather more innocent, in Hogwarts' halls.

Severus conjured light for the oil lamps, chasing the night away to the corners.  'What's this, then?' he asked, touching the silver cuff on Lupin's left wrist.  It was not silver, could not be silver on the man who wore it, a man who still bore the self-inflicted marks of moons past.  A glint of copper gleamed on the raised edges of the engravings, where time had begun to rub away the gilt.  A row of tusked elephants marched from each end of the cuff to meet in the middle, joined by a moon three-quarters full.

Lupin propped his chin on Severu's hipbone.  'Got it from a john,' he said.  Severus thought it might be dark enough yet to hide his flush, but perhaps those mysterious werewolf senses were good for something after all, the scent of blood heating his cheeks.  Lupin's swollen pinked mouth curved up, a glint of teeth catching in the flickering lamplight.  'Oh, your face,' he said.  'You know that's a tell, how you freeze up like that.'

'I know no such thing.'  He gave Lupin a push full in the face, gentle enough that Lupin only chuffed out a chuckle.  'Nothing you do surprises me now, I suppose.'

Lupin sprawled onto his back, crocking one leg against the wall.  The cuff made a rotation, once, twice, around the knobby bone of his wrist.  'John Propser.  He was two years ahead of us at Hogwarts.'

From a john.  A John.  Lupin's hair was especially soft, there above his ear.  'But it is a lover's gift,' Severus guessed, and Lupin nodded affably enough.  'Why elephants?'

'You remember the Spirit Animal lesson in Fifth Year Divination?'

'No, I'd dropped it by then.  Your spirit animal is the elephant?'

'Large mammal.  Grey.  Travels in packs.'  One hand raised and fell back to the duvet, a Gallic shrug.  'John drew his own conclusions.  I didn't correct him.'  The cuff turned this way and that, fingerpads tracing familiar paths over the etchings.  'He's dead now,' Lupin said, quite casually.

They lay in quiet for a long time, then.  Severus thought, and chose not to think too long, that Lupin had been five years like this.  How many regrets stretched across those years?

'If you can cry,' Severus said eventually, 'you're not so far gone as you think.'

'Am I?'  Lupin brushed his thumb over his cheek.  The streak of wet on his finger seemed to fascinate him.  'It's strange, isn't it.  As if my body remembers.  But I don't feel it.  I--'  He hitched on a laugh.  'Isn't it strange, I can't even want it badly enough.'

Severus turned the cuff to the light of the flickering candle.  'Why didn't he give it back?'

'John?'

'Dumbledore.  Why didn't he give your memory back to you?'

'When you tattle on my evil plans tomorrow, you can ask him.'

'Lupin.'

'You won't surprise him.'  Lupin took off the cuff, and set it aside.  Strung along the neck of the empty bordeaux bottle.  He said, 'Dumbledore didn't save us.  He didn't save anybody, but-- he didn't try, with us.  You know why, you said it yourself.  He's too much of the Light.  And we're not enough.  His werewolf and his Death Eater.  We're useful.  We're necessary.  And Dumbledore is smart enough to look the other way.'

'He doesn't know,' Severus protested, through the prick of doubt tightening his throat.  'He can't.'  Lupin rolled onto him, his body dragging slowly along Severus' naked limbs, his knees settling to either side of Severus' hips and his mouth coming to rest against the whorl of Severus' ear, warm breath raising shivers all over him.  Severus wet his dry lips.  'I'm going to tell him tomorrow,' he said.  'I'm going to tell.  I can't let you go through with this.'

'I don't believe you,' Lupin whispered, and if he didn't know what he knew he might have thought that soft whisper was tenderness, the caress on his hand was love.  'But that's for tomorrow,' Lupin added then, and drew him down for a kiss.

 

 

 

It was well beyond late.  Early, now.  Somewhere, Argus Filch was rising for another day of chasing trouble, and Minerva McGonagall was comforting some homesick child, and Albus Dumbledore was pacing his office after a long night thinking of the future he was weaving one weighty decision at a time, and somewhere beyond Hogwarts there was Delphine and Germaine d'Armagnac asleep in their beds, wondering what had become of their Professeur, and somewhere beyond even that there was Harry bloody Potter, no doubt sleeping like a babe without even that much worry, waiting to grow up and save the whole Wizarding world.

Severus Snape stared at the black blob that was his ceiling, listening to the slow, even breaths of the man who shared his bed, asking himself whether it really mattered, whether it was really his job to stop it even if it did.

Probably not.  But, still, within his power, if he chose to.  Was that enough of a reason?

His fingertips found the tender inside of Lupin's wrist, tracing a ridgeline of old scarring that severed jaggedly up the vein.  'Lupin?'

His answer was a sleepy inhale.  'Go to sleep, Severus.'

That scar travelled all the way to the elbow, one of a dozen wounds of a lifetime's self-inflicted suffering.  'Lupin,' Severus asked him, the hush of the night wrapping them close, 'why did you do it?  I mean... I mean to ask, why did you try to die?  I understand all of it but that.  Vengeance I understand, justice, if you want to call it that... Despair, I understand despair.  But not trying to die to escape it.'

Lupin's hand closed over his.  'Severus--'  Lupin sighed softly.  'They knew me.  They saw me.  I know they weren't perfect, I know what they did to you, I know we were children then and I know every other objection, I've thought it all and through again to the other side.  But they saw me.  And they didn't turn away.  I've been my whole life thinking no-one could ever know me, because of the other me, the monster in me, that keeping this secret was all that stood between me and annihilation.  Annihilation of what?  I’ve already lost everything it’s possible to lose.  Job, home, family.  Friends.  Justice is cold comfort, but that’s what Dumbledore gave me specially.'

'What did he say to you?  Why didn't it work?'

'But it did,' Lupin whispered.  'Purpose.  It’s the only thing I have that can’t be taken away from me.  Even by Dumbledore.'

He wasn't sure, really, which of them he ached for.  Which of them he was angry for.  Himself, certainly.  Severus Snape, the malevolent vulture of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he knew what it was to be the wrong in your own life, be the source and the destination of everything small, everything ugly, everything loathsome and misshapen and ignoble.  Severus Snape, son of a Muggle and a ruined woman, the Half-Blood Prince he'd styled himself with too much self-mockery to sustain the illusion of anything better.  But one day, he would show them, he'd vowed a thousand times.  One day it would be his turn, one day he would have a victory that wasn't hollow and shallow and silly, one day he would be a man and he would crush those schoolboy tormentors and show them, show them-- The Half-Blood Prince, who'd never forgot a single insult, a single minor prank in the escalation to the one that had threatened his life, and if he'd known the moment he took that horrible brand on his left arm that he'd been doubly a fool, he could say at least he knew the allure of it.  To be seen.  To be acknowledged.  He'd thought, for a damn fool moment, it would be Lord Voldemort and his sworn companions who would give him that.

Dumbledore had saved him, to turn him against his dark master.  Albus Dumbledore had given him a purpose, a reason, a life.  And would be so very disappointed with him, if he knew what Severus planned to do, and why he planned to do it.

He turned Lupin's head toward him on the pillow.  He stroked Lupin's cheek, just a little rough with stubble, soft over the dimple in his chin.  In the dark, he picked out the wan glint of green irises, and plunged himself into Lupin's mind.  Not to watch, this time.  To show.

Memory of a memory.  Summerlea House, the little bedroom with the whitewash and the iron bed, the diamond-shaped window that cast a glow over the hands twining rope into a noose.  Memory of a memory, the hushed fall of bare feet on the runner carpet, walking past closed doors, slumbering souls in a sort of funereal procession.  Memory of a memory, standing there holding the rail over the loft, wondering if it would hurt, wondering if it could hurt enough to break the ice in his heart.  Memory of a memory, the lingering pain of his crushed larynx, the whisper of bandages about his neck as Dumbledore led him by hand through the ruin of the house in Godric's Hollow, led him there to the graves, sat with him on a snow-covered bench watching the moon rise.  Memory of a memory, the sharp scent of his own blood, pouring warm from his arms, the tremble in his finger as he used his own blood to etch his last word into the floorboards.  Ready.

Memory of a memory.  It's still my choice.

Forgive me, Dumbledore said, and did it anyway.

Forgive me, Severus breathed, and Lupin blinked, shuddered, shuddered all over with a choked-off cry.  Severus framed his face, held him through it, held him there and made him watch it all.

The flare of accidental magic shook the cabinets on the wall, dislodged a picture frame, cracked the glass shade of the lamp.  The bed jumped whole inches away from the wall, the iron frame scraping across the stone, only barely louder than Lupin's pained gasp.

Than the ringing slap of Lupin's hand to Severus' face.  It left a scratch, low on his cheek, with a bit of blood that went hot and then cold, exposed to the air.

Lupin climbed over him, wavered on his feet a moment, and walked out.

Severus lay back, staring up at the black blob that was his ceiling, thinking nothing.

 

 

 

In fifth year he'd dropped Divination to take the pre-requisite year of Astronomy necessary for NEWTs-level Arithmancy.  The Tower was the farthest one could get from the Slytherin dormitories, across the castle and the highest point accessible to students, barring Dumbledore's office, which stood taller by virtue of the hill on which the north wing was built.  The number of steps changed sometimes as often as weekly, legend had it daily when Depinder the Destined had woven his dream-magicks in the seventeen hundreds.  Severus climbed three hundred ninety two in the grey pre-dawn, shivering in his dressing gown and slippered feet and never remembering to transfigure himself a blanket, as Lupin had done.

Just a blanket, Severus saw, and wondered if he were comforted.  No rope in evidence, though at this height Lupin could have done without and merely thrown himself from the window, to be discovered by Hagrid or some unlucky student by morning light.

Severus swallowed thickly.  He was not relieved, but something rather like that moved through him, seeing Lupin sitting there on the window seat, watching lavender and orange limn the mountain ridge on the horizon.

'You won't do anything foolish,' he asked, or said, his voice a rusty whisper that could hardly carry the distance between them, but Lupin looked around, saw him, and met his eyes one last time, no matter how badly it had gone for him every other time.

And nodded, anyway.  'I won't,' Lupin replied, just as softly.

Severus knelt carefully at his side.  The blanket was scratchy, with fringed tassles-- one of the sofa pillows, originally.  It caught at his hair as he laid his head in Lupin's lap.  Lupin's palm followed, curving lightly over his temple, tucking a strand of his hair behind his ear.  He touched the scratch he'd left on Severus' cheek, mute remorse.

'Werewolf wounds,' Lupin murmured.  'It won't heal well.'

'Good,' Severus said.

They watched the sun rise, together, and if one or the other of them did so with wet eyes, neither brushed it away.


	12. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
> 
> ~Meditations in an Emergency, by Frank O'Hara

'Do you remember being a student here?'

'You don't? How many memories did Albus take from you?'

The wind off the Lake retained its winter chill. There was frost on the browned grass, steam in their breath. Lupin shivered a bit in a thin cloak, but made no complaint. He regarded the Lake and the mountains beyond with a steady gaze, but his hands looked white, fragile, hanging there at his sides. Severus thought of offering his gloves, and didn't.

'Not events, obviously,' Lupin said. 'I meant how it felt. I don't remember how it felt, being a student here. I don't remember what I was thinking the first time we crossed the Lake. I mean I must have been excited, yes? Seeing the castle the first time, all lit up against the dusk. The Sorting. I don't remember... I don't remember the others, really, how they were then. Sirius was so angry, all the time, but he learnt to laugh somehow. Peter-- Peter was so quiet you could forget he was there. I think he preferred us to forget him, sometimes, til he was sure we truly wanted him about. We. There was no we, til James decided, and that was that, wasn't it. You didn't tell James Potter no. But I don't remember how it felt.'

Severus wet his lips. It was only painful to look at Lupin in profile, he decided, because of the angle of the sun, stinging his eyes. He cleared his throat. 'It might be an effect of the Legilimency. I should not, perhaps... should perhaps have warned you.'

'No.' Lupin touched him, or very nearly-- near enough for Severus to register cold against his skin, but not the pressure of fingers on his. 'This wasn't anything you did. I'm just-- wishing I could remember, that's all.'

'What's to remember? You were happy.'

'Do you know,' Lupin said. His voice went husky and dry with effort. 'I've never really trusted happiness. It's always so... tenuous, I suppose.' He gave himself a shake, and turned to Severus. 'What will you tell Dumbledore?'

'Nothing. There is no reason he should know.'

'Should or shouldn't, he might do.'

'What do you plan on telling him, then?'

'I don't know,' Lupin replied honestly. 'I suppose I would say you did it to save me.'

'You could just as easily say I was tired of this silly feud between you.'

'I could. I will, if you want me to.'

'I didn't do it to save you.' A gust of frigid wind ruffled his hair, and a violent shudder took him. 'I did it for me. There's no such thing as true altruism, and even if there were I've never had any of it, Lupin, you should be wise enough to that. I did it for me, not for you, because that's the kind of wretch I am, selfish and miserable.'

'Severus,' Lupin said softly, and this time did touch him, at least til Severus pulled away. 'I'm sorry,' Lupin said then, more reservedly. 'But you aren't. You didn't have to retrieve my memories from Dumbledore, and you didn't have to share them back even if you did. You can't know... I wish you could do. It's like I'm seeing the world anew, and you did that, you gave me that.'

'Stop it,' Severus grated. 'Stop prattling on, you fool. I didn't do it to help you, I did it to stop you, I did it to reduce you, I did it to--' Soft green eyes stared back at him, and Severus sneered him down. 'When Lily-- the Potters died, when the Dark Lord was defeated and fled, when I had nothing left, what do you suppose Albus told me?'

Lupin was all pale face and eyes, green eyes.  'I don't know, Severus.'

'Purpose.  He told me I could serve the world, if I could just bear to live in it a while longer.  Serve him.  Serve the Light.  He gave me a reason to endure this, and I have endured.  He did that for me, when he could have let me vanish, let me fade, let me drown myself in my sorrows.  He did that for _me_.'

He didn't look at Lupin.  Wouldn't, not couldn't.  Couldn't.

Lupin moved, maybe just enough to breathe, but no more than that.  He said, very softly, 'I didn't mean to take that away from you.'

'You don't even want it,' he said, couldn't stop himself saying, and closed his eyes on bitter self-loathing.

'Severus.'

'No.'  He negated that with every fibre in him, couldn't bear-- wouldn't bear it.  'Dumbledore saved you, I saved you, you can save your own bloody self.  You _can_ save yourself.'  Abruptly his wind left him and he sagged, physically sagged, even his mental defences falling.  His throat was tight, his palms damp.  He blinked wetly into the wind, knowing it wasn't just the sting of the cold, and hating it.  'I want you to,' he whispered airlessly.

'We,' Lupin said, and he was a hesitating blur on the edge of Severus' vision, standing there, wavering, but not leaving.

Anyway, Severus knew what he meant.  We could save each other.  He was glad of it, in one way, that Lupin was capable of the idiotic sentimentality.  It righted something in the world, Severus had righted that in the world, but it didn't right anything else.  We.  The words didn't fit in his head, didn't fit in his heart, his small black Severus Snape heart.  But he wished they could.  And maybe that was more room than he'd given to anything else since Lily Potter had laid dead in his arms.  And maybe that was enough.  For now.  For him.

Lupin put his hand on Severus' shoulder.  A moment later, his head followed it down, resting in the crook of Severus' neck.  When he straightened, it was to press a kiss, gently and briefly, to Severus' cheek.

'Be well,' he said, and walked away, trudging quietly uphill with his carpet bag over his shoulder, headed for the gate.

Severus didn't watch him go.

He was at his lesson plans-- well, staring at the same graph over and over, registering it less and less each time-- when Dumbledore came looking for him.  Severus marked his place with a slip of silk and let the parchment roll, cocking an eyebrow with cool challenge.  Dumbledore didn't sit til Severus surrendered, giving in ungraciously.  The old man eased himself down on the brown chair with the extra cushion, sighing as he did so.  Age could take any man, even that one, gnarling the fingers that curled about the arms of the chair with the same delicacy they curled about a wand, and the eyes that glittered behind the half-moon spectacles seemed tired, today, unwontedly tired.  Perhaps he had considered it his duty to keep a sleepless night, after what had passed in his office.

His guess was confirmed when Dumbledore broke the silence.  'Should we worry that Remus will hunt for Harry Potter?'

'Hunt him?'  Severus stretched his parchment across the desk anew, though the words swam every bit as much as before.  'An unusually violent evocation of his werewolf state, for you.'

'It is at least theoretically conceivable that his werewolf state would make it possible for him to locate young Mr Potter in ways no-one else can.'

'What, sniffing out his blood?'  Severus ostentatiously filled the timetable.  'It is theoretically possible.  One might also theorise that if he could do it, he'd have done it already.'

Dumbledore nodded slowly.  'Yes, I suppose that's true.'  He twined the tip of his snowy beard with one long forefinger.  'Perhaps,' he said.

'Perhaps?'

'I wonder, if in your renewed friendship--'

'Association,' Severus corrected coldly.

'Association,' Dumbledore accepted.  'If in that renewed association any favours were discussed, such as the provision of the Wolfsbane Potion.'

'He's never asked me for it,' Severus answered quite truthfully.

'But he procures it somehow?'

'I'm sure I don't know.'

'But if he procures it somehow,' Dumbledore said, 'and if he were driven to accomplish a purpose such as tracking Harry Potter, I think it very possible he could succeed.  And he must not succeed, Severus.  Anonymity and the blood wards are Harry's only protection until he comes to Hogwarts.'

'Sooner shout at the rain, Albus.  I don't know how you mean to stop Lupin if he does try it.  Flood the entire European market with ineffective Wolfsbane on the off chance he purchases it?'

'Only the British market,' Dumbledore said.  'In fact we may safely narrow it to the English market, I think, if we conjecture that he would want to be as near as possible to Harry's likeliest location.'

Severus raised his head at that.  'Are you-- are you serious?'

Dumbledore didn't answer immediately, but that wasn't what troubled Severus.  Instead, he was thinking of the Wolfsbane Potion he'd seen brewing in the greenhouse, wherever that had been.  They hadn't been using all the wolfsbane he'd brought Lupin for poison, after all.  So much had happened that day he'd forgot that detail, and now cursed himself for overlooking the obvious.  They were brewing it themselves, or some version of it, perhaps, and who knew the efficacy of it, who could judge the potency and the effects?  What had Damocles said, that the potion must be inefficient, it must rely on expensive and proprietary ingredients, it must require an extended brewing time in professional facilities, extensive monitoring by qualified Masters--

'You would loose a potentially uncontrolled werewolf on the world?' Severus asked.  'And how many dozens of others besides Lupin?  Or have you foresaken the protection of any wizard not named Potter?'

He had at least the gratification to see Dumbledore troubled.  Dumbledore twisted his beard around his finger, weary eyes abstracted.

'I didn't think he would love the boy that much,' the old man said then.

'No?'  Severus flipped his lesson plan upright between them.  'A man capable of that much grief must also be capable of that much love.'

He knew the feel of those eyes on him.  'Yes,' Albus said, and there was a curious emotion in his voice, but Severus refused to look.  'Yes, and thank you for reminding me of that, Severus.  I think I have forgot rather too much about the world and those who live in it, sometimes.'  The beard fell back, slightly curled, to his chest, and Dumbledore folded his hands over his belly.  'Do I disappoint you very much, Severus?'

It was every ounce of self-preservation, every minute of Occlumency ever practised in his life, to keep his face still.  'No,' he replied.  'I have long since learnt the world is less than perfect.'

'That only enjoins us to try all the harder.'

'Then let him look, if that's what he's really after.  Trust him not to do anything if he does find the boy.'

'And can I trust him, Severus?'

'Trust him to know his purpose.'  Severus wrote 'Final' with a flourished F, and the ink flashed purple before setting dry.  'Trust yourself to have chosen your tools well.  Even if you do modify them now and again.'

'Severus.'

'If you don't mind, I'm a bit behind in my work and should like to concentrate.'  A drip of ink escaped the nib of his quill, and he smeared it with his thumb.  'I... would like to be in time for the meal in the Great Hall tonight.'

A short pause bespoke surprise and maybe gratification.  Dumbledore said, 'I shall look forward to seeing you there, then,' and rose, but once on his feet he lingered.  'Severus,' he said then.  'Welcome back, my boy.'

Severus wiped the ink from his finger, and moved his lips in something like a smile.  'Thank you, Albus.'


End file.
